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Dr. Liam Printer - 'The Motivated Classroom' Educational Consultant, Author, Researcher
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Teaching through stories - TPRS just works!

4/3/2015

3 Comments

 
PictureSpanish students writing structures from story
TPRS stands for 'Teaching Proficiency Through Storytelling' and basically it uses stories with lots of repetitions of key structures to teach fluency rather than detailed vocabulary lists. It is based on the theory of 'comprehensible input' which fundamentally outlines that to learn a language you need 'input' (words written and spoken) on repeated occasion in an understandable format. I was first introduced to it last year in our language department here at Leysin American School. I'm not going to lie, when I first watched the 'over the top' teaching of TPRS Godfather Blaine Ray, I was a bit skeptical but the other teachers in my department loved it so I gave it a shot. 

At first it was nothing short of a disaster. I felt exhausted and flustered throughout the lesson and I think my students simply thought I'd taken the wrong pills that morning. But I persisted with the help of other teachers in the department and we then received two separate training sessions on the approach, one from Blaine Ray himself and another from Beth Skelton. I was hooked. After just 35 minutes of mandarin I was able to read and understand a full page of text and say various key sentences like "I need", "Have you got", "Where is" etc and I could understand more than 95% of someone speaking only in mandarin. After just 35 minutes! It really blew me away. 

PictureSpanish 1 TPRS story by student
If this is the first time you've heard of it you should take a look at Blaine's videos, follow Beth Skelton on twitter and check out Martina Bex's site too. I've never used any other method that worked so well at embedding difficult grammar. I've just spent the last two weeks doing a story with my Spanish 1 class about a guy who was lazy, and used to only sunbathe and watch TV, but then he went to the house of the Aunt of Jennifer Lopez and suddenly became a fitness freak. He went to the Olympics in Puerto Rico and won every gold medal before wanting to participate in a Taco eating contest with... well with Jennifer Lopez's auntie... of course! This was all done in the past tense using a mix of 'preterito indefinido' and 'imperfecto' and the students can all tell me that story now using those structures and speaking about their own life with the same structures.

Here is a picture of a previous story we did 3 weeks ago written as homework by a student. No google translator, no outside help. Simply a method that repeats the key structures with memorable silly details. Trust me, it works. 

Please leave me your comments on get in touch on twitter here or tweet @liamprinter

3 Comments
Beth Skelton link
4/3/2015 22:09:59

Liam, TPRS comes naturally to you. I was amazed to see how easily you incorporated TPRS into your lessons while continuing to build in plenty of partner practice and interactive strategies. Your students know they have 'el mejor profesor del mundo'!

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Liam Printer link
5/3/2015 01:01:39

Thanks Beth! It was wonderful having you come to the class and I'm so glad you enjoyed it. TPRS is such a powerful tool but I really like using it the way you showed us with other activities too.

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Rachel Henderson
2/9/2020 17:58:49

Hi Liam,

I'm new to the TPRS approach as a NQT but would love to begin incorporating it in my new school from next week so just wondering what tips you have and what resources you would recommend to get me up to speed so I can at least introduce some of the TPRS approach from next week - tall order I know but all suggestions would be very welcome. Muchas gracias, Rachel

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    Dr. Liam Printer:
    Host of The Motivated Classroom podcast, keynote speaker, presenter, lecturer, language teacher, teacher trainer, educational consultant, published author and basketball coach. 14 years teaching experience in a variety of educational settings. Currently I am the Teaching & Learning Research Lead and Approaches to Learning Coordinator at the International School of Lausanne in Switzerland where I also teach language acquisition.

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