TPR Storytelling: Learning language with pleasure!

In the article Real food in Trouw Groen of May 30, 2009, we outline a development that concerns our food chain. Now there is a parallel development in education. This is still in the margins, but will unmistakably continue to break, because it is a '' sign of the times ''. In the aforementioned article Real food reads: "(...) The food chain is not used to make as much money as possible, but for which it is really meant: feeding people This view, not the individual gain but the well-being of the community first and foremost - needs a mental turn, actually identical to the turn that has to be taken in the financial world. (...) "

In this article I will elaborate on this need for a mental tilt, because secondary developments can be seen in secondary education as outlined above. There has been an enormous increase in scale in secondary education and efficiency and cost savings are paramount. Schools say on their websites and in their publication material '' there for the child to be child-oriented '', but do they actually do what they say? And how much attention is there for the individual teacher, if he is no longer a "starter"? In education, a mental tilt is also needed to bring back the human dimension here and to really "feed" the students: not only to fill cognitively, but to feed on all areas of being human. There are methods to be found which actually bring about this "feeding". One of these has been developed in America in the 1980s by the Spanish Blaine Ray teacher. His working method TPRS (= Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling) has now been used by more than six thousand language teachers worldwide, but especially in America. Here in the Netherlands the first pioneers started. It is exceptional to mention that the effective language acquisition method TPRS is only beginning to become known in the Netherlands despite globalization and the internet! Not to mention the rest of Europe ...

TPRS is a method in which one takes into account the way in which our brain acquires language. But that is not all: the language is acquired in this method in a slightly different way than it has always been used to, namely, ending with the text instead of starting with it. Here it is emphatically speaking about "language acquisition" and not about "language learning process". Blaine Ray, in imitation of Krashen , indicates that a language can not be learned, only acquired and that specific requirements must be met in order to speak a language fluently: it must be 100% comprehensible, a lot of repetition is needed and it should be interesting, to arouse interest. TPRS meets these three requirements. The language acquisition process is carried out with the help of stories, in which the pupils play the leading role. They do not first learn words and therefore understand texts, stories. No, the story and the pupils form the starting point and in this way the students learn the language. This demands a tilt in the teacher's thinking. Starting points are the pupil and the learning process of the student and not the teacher who empties a bucket of knowledge into the pupils (compare how geese with funnels are fed or actually better: filled for large unnatural goose livers).

Many a teacher does not know what he hears and sees when he becomes acquainted with TPRS ; this in both positive and negative terms. Especially the teachers who feel strongly that they can no longer teach as before, because the pupils really have become different and consequently the teachers who are looking for new ways, are very pleasantly surprised with this effective method. I quote a colleague from Friesland who has been in the business for 24 years: "I can not teach in the same way as I used to. The pupils do not want to learn anymore. They find French too difficult and do not even bother, they do not do their homework. Now I have tried a few things from TPRS in my lesson and the students were very enthusiastic! And what I had never heard in my career, they asked at the end of the lesson: '' Madam, are we going to do this next lesson again? '' These sounds have been sounding in America for decades with the teachers who are there with TPRS . go to work.

Because the pupils themselves are going to make part of the stories, because the stories are personified, the human measure comes back into the school. Schools have often become large learning factories where the human dimension has been lost. With TPRS , teachers and students connect with each other. For the teacher and the pupils the story and the pupils are central and learning the language actually happens unconsciously, it happens as a kind of by-product. At the end of the ride the students suddenly seem to master a great deal of the language, both in terms of listening and speaking as well as reading and writing. While the pupils did not feel that they had to put in a lot of "trouble". This gives the students a lot of confidence and it also gives them the feeling that they can learn a different language, that this is even fun! Ben Slavic , the author of TPRS in a year! has participated in the National French Exam sponsored by the American Association of Teachers of French with students who had had two years of TPRS French . Normally, students participate in the "current" education that had four years of French. Ben 's students scored as highest! One student even found errors, which the native speakers had overlooked when the exam was made!

TPRS is a shock to the "traditional" teachers, who find it pleasant that "the book" is ready for everything: ready-made workbooks, pre-baked tests per chapter, slick multimedia websites and so on. "And grammar, do they learn grammar with TPRS ?!" In the "standard language lesson" there is twenty minutes, half an hour of the lesson in which the "traditional teacher" does a listening exercise with the students, reads a text, explains new material, often with grammar, and then the students can do the rest of the lesson. to do their homework, that is to say, to fill in the workbook and sometimes to practice pre-cooked dialogues in duos. Speaking in the target language is on average little time of the lesson, although every teacher finds it important but also difficult to give shape. For languages ​​other than English, students can often read properly, listening is more difficult, as is writing, but speaking is often very lousy. While a language is acoustical and must be heard and also spoken in order to acquire it for fluent language use. A comparison: you can not learn to play tennis in writing. You have to physically do it! That is also the case with language. You can not learn to speak a language in writing ... TPRS insists that language acquisition is in fact a motor skill. TPRS also takes into account that roughly 20% of a language is spoken 80% of the time. People use so-called "frequency dictionaries". If you are offered a limited vocabulary, but with the most widely used vocabulary, you can already communicate fluently (= without hesitations) in the target language. The traditional standard methods offer far too much vocabulary, which is also repeated far too little. These methods do not feed, they fill. Just as one currently sees in the diet of the average person: one fills himself, one does not feed. "Der Mensch ist, wass er is ..."

Because TPRS is so different from what you are used to and a tilt in thinking is necessary and because you have to "do it" above all else, you better not read TPRS , but you have to experience it yourself and see it. That is why at the National TPRS conference, a number of sessions have also been set aside for the language teachers present there to learn a different language such as Chinese or Russian via TPRS as a beginner. Once you have had this experience, you know what your beginners are going through and will adjust the pace of their lessons and the amount of vocabulary offered! But he has also experienced the power of TPRS !

"I forget what I hear, what I see I know and what I do I remember". I hope you have shown in this article that a mental tilt is also required in language teaching. Currently, there are two organizations in the Netherlands that deal with TPRS . These are Taalleermethoden.nl from Alike Last and TPRS Nederland from Kirstin Plante and Iris Maas. We cordially invite you to come and experience this special teaching method!

Alike Last : "I have been working with TPRS with adults for three years now and also with them it works very effectively." The students are happy to finally speak the language! "The lessons are varied, partly because I base the lessons on Multiple Intelligence. Because we make stories ourselves, we use a piece of creativity and imagination, which is hardly used anymore in this image and television era, but which provides a lot of positivity, enthusiasm and humor in the lesson, which makes learning easier, because everyone is relaxed, and that is important in a learning process! And partly because stories are visual, the language comes to a much deeper level than when you only work with translation, and this has a strong effect on retrieval - being able to retrieval - in the long term. "

Biography Alike Last
Alike Last is a French teacher, an after-school teacher and a work and organizational psychologist. She has fifteen years of experience as a trainer and after-school teacher and for nine years as a French teacher. She is founder and teacher of Merry & French, learning language with pleasure and Taalleermethoden.nl . In 2008 she participated in the National TPRS conference in Minneapolis with training and coaching for and by TPRS teachers. She has organized TPRS training in the Netherlands for Blaine Ray and for Susan Gross in recent years and she also provides TPRS & TPR training through Taalleermethoden.nl .

Literature:
Ray, Blaine & Seely, Contee; Fluency through TPR storytelling; Blaine Ray workshops / Command Performance Institute; Pismo Beach / Berkeley; 5 ^the pressure, 2008
Slavic, Ben; TPRS in a year! ; 4 ^the pressure; Littleton, Colorado / Ermelo; 2008