Listen and Perform: Total Physical Response Activities for Beginning and Intermediate ESL Students is an illustrated lesson plan for teaching English with TPR. Listen and Perform by Stephen Silvers provides material for 75 to 100 hours of TPR classroom instruction.
For stress-free learning of English using the powerful linguistic tool of TPR. Listen and Perform was classroom-tested for 20 years in Brazil by Stephen Silvers with extraordinary success, and is now used throughout the world. TPR (known worldwide as the Total Physical Response) is a powerful linguistic tool developed through 30 years of meticulous research by Dr. James J. Asher at San Jose State University in California. The Total Physical Response (TPR) approach recreates, to a large extent, the process that a child uses to acquire its first language.
a. The infant develops a high level of listening competency before the child begins to speak. A child whose production is limited to one or two-word utterances is perfectly capable of understanding a complex sentence such as "Go to your room and get the ball." The child cannot yet produce this sentence but demonstrates understanding by performing the action.
b. There is an intimate relationship between language and a child's body. Much of the child's first exposure to language comes in the form of commands given by an adult or "care giver" to guide the child in relation to concrete objects and actions, such as
Give me your hand.
Take your truck.
Do not touch the stove. It burns.
c. The child speaks when the child is ready. Just as a parent can not teach an infant to walk, one cannot teach an infant to talk. The infant begins to talk when a stage of readiness is reached, and this "readiness" is contingent upon first having assimilated a good portion of the language code. Speech cannot be taught; it is a developmental process which will appear spontaneously when the child is ready to speak.
There is also a companion CD available for each language through tpr--world.com
Workbooks for Spanish and French are also available through tpr--world.com
Suggestions for the teaching of Listen and Perform may be found in Silvers's Listen and Perform Teacher's Guidebook, available from Sky Oaks Productions. For a complete description of the theory and application of TPR read Learning Another Language Through Actions: The Complete Teacher's Guidebook, by James Asher. We would also highly recommend viewing the following documentaries on DVD, produced by Dr. Asher showing children and adults using TPR to learn English, Spanish, German and Japanese (available through tpr--world.com):
- Children Learning Another Language: An Innovative Approach - DVD
- A Motivational Strategy for Language Learning - DVD
- Strategy for Second Language Learning - DVD
- Demonstration of a New Strategy in Language Learning - DVD
