Dr. Brown developed his ideas over many years of studying languages both as a learner and as a teacher, and he wrote the story of how he developed his ideas in “From the Outside In” (zippped pdf file free download).

Essentially, it follows Krashen’s recommendations: lots of interesting comprehensible input and no output, at least at the beginning. Brown and AUA (the Bangkok school where he developed his approach) are apparently famous for strict enforcement of this rule.

I found Brown’s account highly intriguing, and stayed up late reading it (I skipped the boring science bits; so sue me!). As someone who is familiar with Krashen’s Natural Approach and Input Theory and who has been using TPRS for about a year now, I was more interested in the nuts and bolts, such as materials (Chapter 7, p. 12):

1. Classroom procedures: Taking the roll, making announcements, etc.
2. Manipulating objects: Colored blocks, water in buckets, cups, and spoons, etc.
3. Daily routines: Getting up in the morning, making breakfast, taking a bath, etc.
4. Demonstrations: Using a computer, scientific experiments, magicians’ acts, etc.
5. Physical activities: Sports, exercise, physical games, dancing, etc.
6. Fun and games: Table games, party games, puzzles, toys, etc
7. Information about students: teachers talking about the students’ statistics.
8. Show and tell: Students bring objects and teachers talk about them.
9. Pictures and maps: Snapshots, slides, picture magazines, etc.
10. Role-plays: Taxi driver and fare, waiter and customer, doctor and patient.
11. Stories: Children’s stories, folk tales, comic books, anecdotes, etc.
12. General information: bus routes, weather data, current events, etc.
13. Cultural information about target country: how they eat, dance, bathe, etc.
14.  ‘Sheltered’ subject matter (teaching classes in the target language).

Another item of particular interest was the discussion of how to calculate students’ progress. This is done, as I understand it, in terms of hours of exposure. For this reason, teachers at the AUA school in Thailand, where Dr. Brown developed his method, were asked to supply students’ hours of attendance along with their grades (from Chapter 7, p. 16 ff):

Just as I knew what most toddlers of age 12, 18, and 24 months could do, I could tell fairly well what NA [Natural Approach] students of ‘age’ 200, 400, and 600 hours could do. And I could even start to match up the results of student hours with toddler months. 600 student hours, for example, produced results comparable to 24 toddler months. (I’m referring to English speakers learning Thai, of course. English speakers learning French might do this in less than 300 hours.)

Doc Brown no longer works at AUA, but AUA is still active and still using this variant of Krashen’s Natural Approach. ALG has its own YouTube channel. Here’s director David Long explaining the approach (it drags a little at the beginning, but starts to get interesting and detailed at the 5th minute or so):

Another fan of TPRS and Krashen, and a developer of his own method and materials, is AJ Hoge, who also spent years teaching English in Thailand. Here’s AJ’s critique of the AUA method:

The Thai language program at the AUA Language School is unique in the world. This program attempts to follow Krashen’s theories to their obvious conclusion. The program utilizes a long silent period of approximately 800 hours, during which students do not speak Thai. Rather, all emphasis is on comprehensible input. AUA uses a technique called the “talk show” in order to give students input in Thai. Two teachers teach each class…

The good news is that AUA is getting excellent long term results from those who complete the entire program…

The bad news is that most students do not complete the program. AUA has a big retention problem…

Do you teach a foreign or second language at university? Is fluency a key goal of yours? Are you using TPRS, or some similar approach? If so, you might be interested in what I’ve written below, and I’d be interested in reading your comments.

Every teacher who attempts to use TPRS must adapt it to his or her circumstances. However, I believe there is something rather unique about using TPRS to teach EFL at university. Here’s my list.

1. Our students are not complete beginners. The TPRS approach is to first write the target structures on the board with the translation into the students’ native language (L1).  Of course. It is assumed that it is the first time that these students have come across these structures. You can’t assume this with 18/19 year-olds who have been learning English since junior high school at least.
2. Our students are not children. Many of the TPRS books are aimed at junior-high students or younger. Lots of talking animals and mini-plastic elephants. Our students are adults. That means
   1. they learn differently from young children
      1. (according to Susie Gross) adults need only come across a word or phrase 70 times in order to learn it, whereas children need 200-300 repetitions
      2. as a result, they may become bored more quickly with excessive repetition
      3. as a result of 2, teachers of adult learners will need to use a different rhythm and pace from the ones appropriate to younger children
   2. they are likely to get bored quickly with stories of talking animals and mini-plastic elephants
3. There is large gap between receptive and passive skills. Sometimes this gap is huge.  Most students have passed university entrance exams which involve reading and understanding quite difficult written texts (there is no listening, writing or speaking sections to the entrance exams, except for a few questions in English in the interviews and those who take written exams do not have interviews). Yet many of these same students are unable to write complete sentences, and most cannot recognize the words and phrases when they are spoken. In terms of fluency, they are beginners. They need reviews of the English they “learned” in junior high school, i.e. when they first began their formal study of English.
4. Students do not understand the concept of fluency. Way back when, I taught a few classes in junior high schools. The first-year students were bright, cheerful, had bags of energy and curiosity, and the one thing I remember about all of them was that they were not confused about the purpose of learning English: the purpose of learning English was to be able to communicate with English-speaking people. Duh! What else could it be? The confusion starts to set in in the 2nd year and by the 3rd year confusion has yielded to certainty – the certainty that their teachers have no intention of teaching them English to communicate with people. As this certainty and understanding grows, it produces a kind of slow-motion shock, a dulling of the mind. This dulling goes hand in hand with a drop in energy until the zestful 1st-years have turned into 3rd-year zombies (and the process is repeated in high school).

Students have learned, but not acquired, English. They cannot speak it, and cannot understand anything but the most basic of utterances and those only when they are spoken at very low speed.

BUT, they have their pride: if the teacher goes back to junior-high-school level materials, they will resist. I have told my students almost every class that to improve their English they must read and listen a lot, and what should they read and listen to? Not BBC news, but simple stories or texts that they can understand 95% of without a dictionary. I can see the disbelief in their faces, in some cases flat rejection: “The guy cannot know what he’s talking about! Where’s the exit? I gotta get outta here!” “But… but… but… what about vocab? What about grammar? How am I going to learn these?” My colleagues listen politely, then go back to teaching the way they’ve always taught – mostly in L1, and with loads of explanations. Explaining. That’s what they think language teaching is. It’s the same on TV and on radio. The “5-minute English lesson”, which involves a short dialogue focusing on  a single structure: the dialogue is repeated twice, the target structure is repeated slowly several times – total time about 1 minute – leaving 3-4 minutes for the explanation blah-di-blah in Japanese.

5. Teachers see their students only once a week. University classes are 90 minutes. Some classes are twice a week, but most are just once a week. Teachers see their students once or twice a week, but students have more than one English class. Take my students as examples. They have a Basic English (4-skills) class twice a week. That’s 3 hours. They also have a twice-a-week listening class and a twice-a-week Reading/Writing class. We’re now up to 9 hours a week. What if all those teachers used TPRS, or at least a C.I. approach, and were all aiming at developing fluency in all 4 skills?

Having written the above, I now think it would be simpler to show rather than tell. I’ve started videoing some of my classes. I’m still ironing out the bugs (no cameraman, for one thing, and I have to do all my own editing – it took me 2 days just to figure out how to transfer the recording from my digital camera to my computer), but once I have some decent footage, I plan to upload it. Perhaps some more experienced TPRS teachers will view it and leave comments. This will be a form of coaching without the need to travel.

To be continued.

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Prof. Mason promotes, studies, researches and uses Krashen’s theories of language acquisition. On her website is listed some of her publications in this field, including papers on extensive reading, comprehensible input, and so on. Some of her papers are in Japanese. Most can be viewed online and/or downloaded.

She also has a new page for story-telling videos: short videos of someone telling a story in English. Some key words are subtitled. This might be a useful resource. Here’s a sample:

Shimabara coastline, behind the Mt. Unzen Disaster Memorial Centre - Sep. 18, 2010

Had my first full day of Oral English university classes today (all non-English majors) and discovered some more benefits from the TPRS workshop I attended last weekend in Kyushu, Japan. Here’s the short version:

• no prep!
• Increased confidence.
• Sticking to the program of events.
• Didn’t circle every sentence.
• Insisting on absolute quiet and attention during the story-telling.
• Greater variety of activities.
• Faster turnover of activities.
• Update: “three for one”, and
• Something I’m (still) NOT doing.

1. No prep!  University classes in Japan are 90 minutes. Establish meaning – 10 mins. Story – 1o mins. Re-tell – 10 mins. What do you do for the hour that is left? I did not choose a textbook for these university classes because I was not sure of the students’ levels. So I usually have to prepare some handouts.  Last semester, I used “Look, I Can Talk” mini-stories and extended readings. For this semester (same bunch of students more or less), I’ve decided to try “Look, I Can Talk More”, and to use the textbook, rather than the mini-stories.
2. Increased confidence. (This is starting to sound like an ad for something: “Do your students kick textbooks in your face? You need TPRS!!!”) I knew what I was going to do, and needed no props. I was not nervous, but looking forward to the classes.
3. Sticking to a rigorous and methodical progression of a TPRS lesson (see Susan Gross’ handout – this links directly to the PDF file).  Today, I knew in the back of my mind what my final target was: student fluency. I won’t reach it today, and probably not next week or the week after that, either, but that’s ok. Today, we are making the preliminary and necessary steps towards achieving that objective.  And I had in mind a map of where I was going: establish meaning, tell the story, reading/literacy.
   1. Before, I would sometimes start with establishing meaning, but more often than not would launch straight into a story and establish meaning as I went. The reason: I’m teaching university students, not complete beginners, and I don’t know what they already know and what they do not. Also, I don’t know what they know and can or  can’t recognize aurally.
4. Didn’t circle every sentence. I know – this is breaking the law! But I’m not teaching complete beginners, and I have to do things differently if I’m to maintain interest and stave off boredom.
   1. Before (last semester), I was doing PQA because that’s what the manual said; I would “ask the story” because that’s what the manual said, and I asked questions (circled) about every damn sentence in the story because that’s how Blaine Ray said to do it (and how Ben Slavic does it in his French classes). But with many of my uni classes, it just bores students really quickly.
5. Insisting on quiet. Today, I was much stricter than I was last semester about students paying attention and listening quietly. I had not intended to be, it just came naturally. I had to shut up 4 chatty girls several times, and I could see one of them getting pretty ticked off about it. I simply refused to continue until everyone was quiet and paying attention.
   1. This has forced me into a new strategy:
      1. a greater variety of activities, so that students are not forced to be quiet and pay attention for longer than they can handle;
      2. a quicker turnover of activities – e.g. when using story 1 in “Look, I Can Talk More”, I told the first paragraph, with some circling, and some PQA, for about 5-10 minutes, then had them discuss and summarize the first paragraph in Japanese in writing (they don’t have the text in front of them), before going on to the 2nd paragraph, and so on.
6. Pizzazz (see my earlier entry for details). This is a great tool, it really is – playing with my voice, hamming it up even just a little, allows me to maintain interest and to deflect attention from learning. Before, I tried to achieve the same result by asking whacky circling questions or desperate, not-so-subtle PQA. Boy did that get old fast.
7. Not sure this is relevant, but I’ve just finished reading Stephen King‘s “On Writing“, and one of the things he says is, be truthful. Readers can tell when a writer is not being honest. In the same way, it occurred to me today, students (or any audience, really) can tell when the teacher/speaker is not being honest or not manifesting integrity, and they stop responding spontaneously.
8. Update: “three for one”. (This means, repeating the correct answer to a question after students have answered, in three different ways. E.g. if the question is “Did Tiger Woods play badly or Ryo Ishikawa play badly?”, I’d answer, “Tiger Woods. Ryo didn’t play badly, he played well. Tiger Woods played badly.”) Instead of asking stories (asking questions after each sentence of a story), I’m now telling stories and asking a few questions here and there. This seems to be helping to maintain interest, or at least stave off boredom. It’s also less stressful. It also helps focus on the story – it’s the story, i.e. interest in what happens next, however small, that veils the learning (or acquisition) that’s going on.  Asking fewer circling questions, tho, means less CI, so I use the “three for one” technique as much as I can to try to make up the CI. Also, the “three for one” technique helps teach/reinforce the responses I want to hear from students. The lowest achievers can just give one-word answers, whereas those a little higher on the pecking order can try slightly longer phrases, like “Yes, he does” or even perhaps “Yes, he does like to travel to Europe on vacation.”
9. And something I’m still not doing, tho it was a key part of the workshop, is having students come to the front and act out the stories. Sorry. We (students and I) are not ready yet.

The above is a preamble to a post I’m brewing on using TPRS to teach EFL at university. Some of the basics of TPRS need to be changed or adapted to this particular environment, because the students

1. are adults (more or less),
2. get tired quickly of mini plastic elephants,
3. already know a lot of English but
4. usually cannot aurally recognize much of what they “know”,
5. have more adult interests that do not include talking animals
6. are not interested in Hernandez or Maria’s antics in Guatemala or wherever,
7. can already read and write fairly well (tho there are some appalling exceptions),
8. are not accustomed to responding in chorus, and are not about to start now.
9. have mostly forgotten their initial, junior-high-school enthusiasm for using English to communicate to people with,
10. are now focused (with a little help from the publishing propaganda) on utilitarian objectives like improving their TOEIC scores.
11. And that’s just for starters!

Mt Unzen Disaster Memorial Hall - Shimabara TPRS workshop venue, Sep 2010

A TPRS workshop for language teachers was held in Shimabara, Kyushu, Sep. 18-20. The workshop leader was Susan Gross, a retired teacher of French and Spanish in Colorado high schools, and an experienced workshop leader. There was an interpreter, Yuki Watanabe, who translated everything into Japanese, and did an excellent job.

How did I hear about it? Ben Slavic’s blog.

Update: What got me interested in TPRS? I like to hear other teachers’ answer to this question, so here’s mine.

Just over a year ago, I had been teaching my students using a new method that involved testing students almost every class. The test was a conversation with them. The instructor models the new structures, explains new vocab, etc., then has students practice in pairs and goes around to monitor, then sits in a corner of the room and calls students up for conversations and gives points to students for fluency, using target structures, askingquestions, and using strategies such as “Pardon?” “Did I what?” “What does xxxxx mean?” etc.  I thought it was interesting: the “test” gave students a clear goal and an incentive to practice. The textbook was clear, with diagrams and exercises, plus the key parts had a Japanese translation. What could go wrong?

Just one thing: my students did not improve.

Much as I tried to avoid this embarrassing discovery, it was staring me in the face. At about that time, I read the experience of an American teaching English at university in Thailand. On his blog, he told of the same discovery:

1. his students could not speak English in spite of years of English in high school
2. his students could not speak English in spite of taking his class for xxx months/years.
3. his students really wanted to gain fluency in the language, regardless of the university classes’ official goals
4. the university administrators (his bosses) had their own specified goals and targets and approaches, which while traditional (increasing vocab, improving reading comprehension, raising proficience test scores, etc.) were not always compatible with improving fluency

He came to this conclusion: his students were really only interested in gaining fluency in English, and he was letting them down. Short story: he got fired, studied Language Acquisition as part of his M.A. , discovered Krashen and Blaine Ray and TPRS, and is now developing and selling his own materials.

That made me think: I had been confused about my goals. I knew in my heart that many students secretly wanted to be able to speak and understand English (i.e. fluency), at least to a basic level. When they said they wanted to improvie their TOEIC scores, they were to some extent parroting what they had been told or had heard. Also, that’s what I really wanted, too – for them to achieve a basic degree of fluency. Susan Gross told a similar story about how she came to TPRS.

I spent last summer vacation researching and reading as much as I could about TPRS. In the autumn (2nd) semester, I picked one of my general English classes to experiment on, and away I went (read entries in this blog for October 2009).

That’s my story. Now back to the Shimabara workshop.

55 people had signed up for the workshop. There were 30-40 on most days. This was my first TPRS workshop. I had read Blaine Ray‘s book and the 2 books by Ben Slavic. I had also seen Ben Slavic’s videos of him teaching French. I had tried TPRS in all my classes since April 2010.

First, a common misperception: TPRS = Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytellling. The TPR in TPRS does not refer to Total Physical Response, a form of direct language teaching developed by Dr. James Asher. (Blaine Ray, the inventor of TPRS, began with TPR, then developed the storytelling component as a way to extend this. However, as many people had become familiar with the name TPRS, the acronym was kept.)

“Proficiency” means fluency: a facility with the language; it does not necessarily mean a native-speaker’s level of proficiency.

What I got out of the workshop (in no particular order):

1. Circling does not include asking “wh-” questions to which the answer is not already in the story. Such questions can be interesting and help liven up a story or a class, but they are not circling.
2. Asking “wh-” questions to elicit weird, creative or funny details to add to the story is not a compulsory part of TPRS. I had been doing this with every story, but guess what? Students did not find it as entertaining as I did!
3. There is a natural progression towards having students write stories. This is common sense, but I had not thought about this carefully. In my writing class, I had had students writing their own versions to stories right from day 1. The result? I discovered that a few could write quite well, and a few could not write even 1 sentence and were now feeling intimidated. I then had to try and rescue these students in the latter half of the semester. However, 3 stopped attending. Two kept going, which says more about their courage and determination than about my teaching.
4. Pizzazz is NOT an optional extra, but vital to successful TPRS. Susie introduced this topic on the last day. It has more to do with manner, attitude, posture, and so on. I understood pizzazz is a device to do 2 things:
   1. make and keep the linguistic material interesting and the students attentive and motivated, and
   2. trick students into forgetting that they are learning.
5. I’m not a big fan of the “rah-rah-rah” approach to language-teaching, but I could see how it would be a useful tool in a teacher’s “toolbox” as it were, particularly for elementary teachers. And Susie had such obvious fun doing it.
6. Information processing, or how humans remember stuff. “Survival” and “emotion” were the top two: in a life-or-death situation, memory and attention work at top capacity. Also, strong emotions help anchor experience and information in our brains. Given that we could not easily bring our students to near-death experiences or make them cry every day, what are some other things that help memory and retrieval? Meaning and sense.

   This relates to pizzazz above. Pizzazz can help raise the emotional level. Pizzazz can also help relate material to students’ own lives, thereby enhancing meaning and sense. Some factors in pizzazz are

   • gestures
   • intonation (pitch, tone, speed and volume)
   • body posture
   • incongruous detail (this was not on Susie’s list).

   For example, by exaggerating gestures or voice intonation, you can make an ordinary and not particularly interesting story funny. Younger children enjoy exaggeration at any time. Older learners understand the incongruity of taking a mundane story and exaggerating the telling of it.

   In both cases, students forget that they are “learning” (I don’t mean “learning” as opposed to “acquisition” but in the sense that they are in a classroom and supposed to be academically studying something.) Younger children can forget this easily, especially when told a story. It is more difficult to seduce older learners away from academic study and into an imaginary world, but what better way than stories, and if the stories are so-so (and we cannot always find enchanting stories), then exaggeration and pizzazz in the telling and in the questioning can go a long way towards tricking students into acquiring the language (i.e. subconsciously) by distracting them with big gestures and exaggerated tones and facial expressions and incongruous details.

7. “Nothing motivates like success” was a kind of mantra of the workshop. I began to understand how to implement it: try to ensure that at every step, students are not only not intimidated but are given tasks that they are pretty sure they can do and do well.
   In my writing class, I have the weakest group of students in the year. I did not spend much time reviewing language acoustically, but instead dove straight in to having them write their own versions of stories (I used “Look, I Can Talk”). The result? Three students stopped attending. I learned that several students are very capable of writing well and perhaps should not be in that level. Just two students were obviously unable to cope, but they stuck with it. I will try a different approach in the second semester.
8. Last but by no means least, I met a few likeminded people. Until now, I only knew one other person using TPRS in Japan, and he is not teaching at university. I am also very interested to see how the Japanese teachers will fare. How many will try TPRS in the classroom? With what success? What difficulties will they face? If TPRS / teaching for fluency is going to make any kind of mark in Japan, it will have to be implemented successfully by Japanese teachers of language. As they start out trying this new approach, they are going to need support – practical and moral. The natural place to look for this support will be people they meet at workshops like this one.
9. Thank you, Susan! And thank you, Martha, for organizing this. Great energy, lots of information. In a year, I’ll be ready for another workshop. Meanwhile, I hope to keep learning by means of the TPRS Japan forum.

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Classes were going well. I was asking stories and getting some interesting responses. I had students’ attention and interest.

Then interest and attention began to wane.

I knew from talking to individual students that a few of them were much more proficient in Egnlish than the others. I suspected these were getting bored with the stories, and that began to bother me. Was that a mistake?

In one class, one student politely asked me to provide them with more challenging material that involved more language production (I was focusing on comprehensible input). I have done so, and in that class am now doing very little TPRS and more presentations, and will move to discussions and perhaps debates later. There are high-flyers who can do this in the class.

In the other classes, my attempt to retain interest has led me to alter my TPRS routine. However, this has caused further problems: I do not have a replacement system. In other words, I either run my system or I do ad hoc teaching. Ad hoc teaching can work well in the high-flyers class, but the low-flyers flounder. I have no drop-outs in any of my classes, except the lowest level one. In this class, I probably need to return to my system, and ignore the higher-flyers (there are a few that got in by accident), for the sake of the strugglers.

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Well, I didn’t forget, I just put them on the back-burner. Time to resurrect those activities: they provide yet more ways to give comprehensible input; more ways to go over the same ground, but in  different way.

I teach 8 classes using this approach, and I was getting a headache keeping track of which class had done what story, using which vocabulary. I was getting bogged down in record-keeping. Then I remembered: the purpose of using stories is to provide as much comprehensible input as possible.

At the same time, I realized I had been going too slowly. The stories are designed so that the same basic configurations of language are recycled over several stories.  Now that I have realized that, I am now piling on the stories, moving ahead more quickly.  I’m also moving more quickly onto reading after “asking” a story orally.

A big difficulty still remains: checking comprehension. Last year, I found students did not readily respond in chorus, so I abandoned that (especially as I was doing PQA which lends itself to individual answers). This year, I explained the rules from the outset, which rules explicitly state that I expect choral responses, and students, particularly the non-Japanese ones, have been responding well.  However, I see several students who are not responding, and now I do not know why – do they not understand? Is it all too easy for them such that they can’t be bothered to respond? Or some other reason?

A while back, I posted about using dictation in EFL classes. I recently gave dictations in my final exams, and reading the results taught me some further uses for dictation.

• Students failed to notice how a falling intonation indicated the end of a sentence. I did not announce the punctuation, as I had not consistently done so in earlier dictations, and did not want to start now (or then, i.e. in the middle of an exam). It had not occurred to me that the significance of falling intonation was not obvious and needs to be taught. They put full-stops where there should have been commas, and failed to put full-stops (or subsequent capital letters) where they were indicated by meaning and by my falling intonation.
• Dictation can be used to not only test (or review) known or previously taught vocabulary, but also to test if students have acquired enough patterns of English spelling to make a reasonable guess at spelling unfamiliar words. (All my students failed miserably at “champagne”.)
• The dictation revealed grammatical weaknesses I had not covered (I assumed students had acquired enough English, but I was wrong), e.g.:  I gave New Year’s presents two my children.

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Having [students] do time writings without editing is an excellent way to assess fluency.

I’ve been having my students write for 5 minutes almost every class, usually at the beginning, sometimes at the end. Sometimes I set the topic, but most times I left them free to write whatever they wanted. I had them count the words and keep a record. These writing samples were great sources of information, both personal (about students) and linguistic (they revealed areas of grammar, syntax or vocabulary that needed more practice).

I did timed writings in almost all my classes, including “Speaking” and “Listening” classes.