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What is it?

TPRS® 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.

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Tell me more!

TPRS® 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. TPRS® 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 it in action, see the resources below.

TPRS in Action

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.

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The kick drum brings him back. The track, "Kites," begins to soar, those airy, ethereal vocal chops swirling above the bassline. Elias feels that same tension now. He looks around the dancefloor and sees dozens of others, arms raised, eyes closed, all tethered to the same frequency.

In his mind, he isn't in a sweat-slicked room in East London. He is ten years old again, standing on the jagged cliffs of the Antrim coast. The air is cold enough to sting, smelling of salt and wet heather.

He realizes then that everyone here is a kite. We spend our lives trying to catch the wind, trying to rise above the grey concrete of the everyday, tethered only by the fragile strings of our own heartbeat and the person standing next to us.