http://mmbaker1.wordpress.
com/2010/03/10/tprs-my-personal-story/
TPRS: My Personal Story
As Carol Ann Pesola Dahlberg, co-author of Languages and Children: Making the Match,
lovingly taught us at the District Five Summer Institute of 2001, we must always make sure
that every lesson is like a story, with a beginning, middle and end. None of us who were
there has forgotten this or any of the other teachings that Carol Ann so wisely bestowed, and
we still quote her to this very day. I can truly say that Carol Ann shaped me into the L2
educator that I am today.
Six years later, at the request of two of our elementary teachers, District Five brought in
TPRS trainer Carol Gaab for 3 days. I had never heard of TPRS, just TPR. But because I
always attend the things that our district plans for us, I went.
Never could I have been prepared for what I was about to experience. Within 2 hours, Carol
Gaab had us understanding, speaking and having a playful time in some unidentified
language. She did it by TPR-ing words with us and telling us what they meant in English,
having a wolf who was the villain, a bird that it wanted to eat, and chocolate that the bird
would ultimately use to appease the wolf. And “Super Johnny,” one of our fellow teachers,
became a character in the story who would always come to our rescue when the wolf was
being a wolf.
Whichever language it was did not matter to me. I was too busy marveling at what we were
experiencing. What I knew was that we were having fun, internalizing words and possibly
developing a slight affection for them after just a few short hours.
Three years later, those of us who were there can still remember the structures we acquired:
Ha zeev ha gadol ratz le har.
Ha zeev ha katan ratze le bayit.
Ha zeev ochel et ha tsipoor.
Ha zeev / tsipoor bocheh.
Ha tsipoor lokeach et ha shokolad.
Translation:
The big wolf runs to the mountain.
The small wolf runs to the house.
The wolf eats the bird.
The wolf / bird cries.
The bird throws the chocolate.
Experiencing L2 instruction in this way began to change my teaching life forever. By the
way, the language was Hebrew.
Later that summer out of curiosity, I read Blaine Ray’s green book, Fluency Through TPR
Storytelling. It described much of what Carol did and told of countless success stories, ones
that were similar to what we experienced druing those 3 days.
That fall, I decided to try asking a TPR Story on my students. As usual, I taught all of
the Classroom Rules and Consequences, each with its own matching visual, chant and
TPR gesture, as Dawn Samples had taught us to do so many years prior. Next, instead of
doing my culminating worksheet or matching test, I asked a story where a dog sat down in
class and got a verbal praise, a whale did the same and got a treat, but a cat would not sit
down and got all kinds of sad consequences until he finally, finally sat down.
The students and I had so much fun acting it out, and the story and all of the structures
forever became a regular part of our daily classroom conversation. The vast majority of the
students in grades 4-5 were able to write the story out on paper without my assistance, and we
posted the writings in the hallway. Some students even changed the story up to suit their
preferences. Third grade made a couple of big books, and students in grades 1-5 could retell
the story, some without any help at all, others with a few cues just to keep them going.
I didn’t plan to do any more stories after that, even though a few months later, I learned that
my students expected more. After all, I had already spent years painstakingly creating a
working set of K-5 lesson plans that were very familiar, reliable and comfortable to me. But,
by the end of that year, though, I myself was dying to return to the story asking, no matter
what it would cost me in terms of training.
The following school year, I clumsily asked a story at the end of every unit, instead of going
over the culminating worksheets. Although I had carefully crafted them to be as
communicative as possible, the handouts would always seem to die their own, sweet, natural
death inside of dusty Spanish folders, only to be retrieved for our end-of-the-year writing
project. I was looking for something that would keep the language alive in our conversations,
and TPRS did just that.
I also visited Summit School District in Colorado, where every Elementary World Language
teacher uses TPRS. I got lots of good footage and many of my questions answered. But, I
still needed more. The following summer, I attended the 9th annual National TPRS
Conference in San Antonio, Texas, and got lots of coaching and training.
Meanwhile, my district group also began to study TPRS by reading the green book. And this
summer, we are having Elementary TPRS expert Elizabeth Hughes come to us from Colorado
to train us in person.
I am so excited about all of the possibilities that TPRS has to offer for improving our
teaching. I know for sure that it will guarantee that our lessons include stories with a
beginning, middle and end, while we also make sure that the lessons themselves are stories.
For more information about TPRS, please visit: http://www.blaineraytprs.com for an
explanation of TPRS,
[email protected] to post your questions about TPRS,
www.benslavic.com/blog to participate as TPRS is discussed by experts and register for the
10th Annual National TPRS Conference Chicago, IL July 19-23, 2010
http://www.blaineraytprs.com/NTPRS2010.pdf
