Total Physical Response Storytelling
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Total Physical Response Storytelling, now called Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling, or TPRS for short, is a method for teaching Spanish and French in schools. Mr. Blaine Ray created this method by combining a system called TPR with funny stories to help students apply the words learned. These stories are complemented with little books, identical in Spanish and French besides the language. Some include The Voyage of His Life and Almost Dead. Blaine Ray is a Spanish teacher whose main teaching idea is that whatever is best for the majority of the students is the best way to teach.
TPRS is a movement towards building proficiency in the use of grammatical structures through reading stories in addition to the oral storytelling for which TPRS is well-known. Originally incorporating seven basic steps, TPRS now has three main steps to the process:
- Introduction of target grammatical structures through personalized questions and answers directed to individual students,
- Telling of the main story using a circling technique of asking questions (resulting in multiple repetitions of the target structures), and
- Reading stories where the target structures are used in various contexts.
TPRS is based on the importance of comprehensible input as the key factor in developing fluency in the target language and is supported by Dr. Stephen Krashen's research.