Co-creating stories to provide huge amounts of compelling comprehensible input.
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TPRSŸ is a specific instructional strategy involves the co-creation of a narrative through story asking, using high frequency vocabulary, and providing lots of input in the target language with small amounts of translation for clarity. Story asking is the process where the teacher asks the the students questions to determine the details of a story. Skills involved in this process are circling, pausing & pointing, using gestures, comprehension checks, pop-up grammar, and so forth. Literacy is a huge component as the created narrative becomes a text for extension activities, follow up stories, and so forth.
TPRSÂź was invented in 1990 by a Spanish
teacher named Blaine Ray. Blaine was inspired by the works of Stephen Krashen as well as James Asher, who stressed
the importance of gestures and movement to help in the language acquisition process. TPRSÂź has grown and evolved quite a bit over the past three decades. Formerly
known as Total Physical Response Storytelling, TPRS has evolved thanks to the thousands of teachers who have contributed,
expanded, and refined the strategy. There is also a huge body of
research on the topic. For some of those resources and to see âit in
action, see the resources below.
Featured video: Watch Aya Shehata as she gives a TPRS demo in Japanese, including background about the strategy and how she incorporates it into her class.
Then, he was in.
Thatâs when the game became real.
The game wasnât what he expected. There were no tutorials, no maps, no health bars. Just a vast, neon-drenched ocean city called Fin City. The water was warm and bioluminescent, and the sky above the surface was a permanent, bleeding sunset.
What is TPRS?
by Fluency Fast
sharkboy game
TPRS Demo
by Adriana Ramirez
Then, he was in
Then, he was in.
Thatâs when the game became real.
The game wasnât what he expected. There were no tutorials, no maps, no health bars. Just a vast, neon-drenched ocean city called Fin City. The water was warm and bioluminescent, and the sky above the surface was a permanent, bleeding sunset.
Have you done TPRS in your class? Do you have tips, resources, a story or video demonstration to share? Drop me a line!