The Total Physical Response Method: A maximum expression of behaviorism?
by O. G. P.
Subject: Teaching English as a Foreign Language: Methodology I
In this essay, I will talk about what I regard the worst ideas of the Total Physical Response which will be referred as the TPR. As it is known, the TPR starts from the assumption that L2 can be learned the same way in which one learns the L1, like the Direct Method and the Audio-lingual Method. I will not delve much into a discussion about that since I have discussed it already in previous essays, but it is necessary to understand that language learning in a child and a teen, and an adult, is certainly different.
One of the things I want to stress in this essay is that little children enjoy a period in which their ability to acquire vocabulary is incomparable to any other stage in life, at a pace that a grown student could not equate (unless it is a genius). Kids’ Language Acquisition Device (LAD), Chomsky would say, is still predisposed and open to learn language, even L2, while adults’ LAD is not. This is why, I think that the TPR is appropriate for little children who begin to learn the L2 at kindergarten of elementary school.
I must admit that, reading about this method, I could not help visualizing students being treated like Skinner’s dogs and pigeons. I wondered, does the student really learn language production, or does he/she learn to imitate the professor? As I see it, the core of this method is precisely imitation and no more. Operant conditioning. Stimulus–response. However, when I saw a video of the method being applied with little children, I changed my mind.
It could be argued that the drawback of this method is the teacher’s role. The professor acts as the only one who decides what students will do. He is in total control of the class, and he not only controls everything, but orders everything that students ought to do. Students can’t be able to communicate what they would want to communicate. It is the teacher the one who tells them what to do, how to do it, and how to react or respond to it. Nonetheless, I noticed that if the TPR method is presented to children students as a kind of “game”, they not only seem to be willing to learn the language, but many actually seem happy and even likely to have fun, given that they are playful children.
I would accept James Asher’s claim that his method is “the fastest, less stressful way to achieve understanding of any target language” (Larsen 2000:108) if we are specifically speaking about children, but I have to question it if we are speaking about grown up students. Children are more likely to receive the teachers’ instructions and follow them as they are expected to do, because they are meek, and playful, but one could hardly expect that an independent adult student would act the same way towards the method. It may also be asked, how abstract notions, mental concepts and non-physical things are supposed to be learned? Probably, the TPR method is not the proper one to answer the question, and cannot be used in intermediate levels, let alone advanced ones.
In conclusion, the TPR method seems to be effective as long as it is used with children in basic levels. For grown up students, including teenagers, the question is whether they would be able to face a real use of language or not. I believe they would not, and thus, it would be inadequate to apply it in any other language teaching context. The contrast is, of course, that for its use in teaching the target language to children, it seems very promising.
Reference:
One of the things I want to stress in this essay is that little children enjoy a period in which their ability to acquire vocabulary is incomparable to any other stage in life, at a pace that a grown student could not equate (unless it is a genius). Kids’ Language Acquisition Device (LAD), Chomsky would say, is still predisposed and open to learn language, even L2, while adults’ LAD is not. This is why, I think that the TPR is appropriate for little children who begin to learn the L2 at kindergarten of elementary school.
I must admit that, reading about this method, I could not help visualizing students being treated like Skinner’s dogs and pigeons. I wondered, does the student really learn language production, or does he/she learn to imitate the professor? As I see it, the core of this method is precisely imitation and no more. Operant conditioning. Stimulus–response. However, when I saw a video of the method being applied with little children, I changed my mind.
It could be argued that the drawback of this method is the teacher’s role. The professor acts as the only one who decides what students will do. He is in total control of the class, and he not only controls everything, but orders everything that students ought to do. Students can’t be able to communicate what they would want to communicate. It is the teacher the one who tells them what to do, how to do it, and how to react or respond to it. Nonetheless, I noticed that if the TPR method is presented to children students as a kind of “game”, they not only seem to be willing to learn the language, but many actually seem happy and even likely to have fun, given that they are playful children.
I would accept James Asher’s claim that his method is “the fastest, less stressful way to achieve understanding of any target language” (Larsen 2000:108) if we are specifically speaking about children, but I have to question it if we are speaking about grown up students. Children are more likely to receive the teachers’ instructions and follow them as they are expected to do, because they are meek, and playful, but one could hardly expect that an independent adult student would act the same way towards the method. It may also be asked, how abstract notions, mental concepts and non-physical things are supposed to be learned? Probably, the TPR method is not the proper one to answer the question, and cannot be used in intermediate levels, let alone advanced ones.
In conclusion, the TPR method seems to be effective as long as it is used with children in basic levels. For grown up students, including teenagers, the question is whether they would be able to face a real use of language or not. I believe they would not, and thus, it would be inadequate to apply it in any other language teaching context. The contrast is, of course, that for its use in teaching the target language to children, it seems very promising.
Reference:
- Larsen-Freeman, Diane (2000). Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching. Teaching Techniques in English as a Second Language (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-435574-2
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