Teaching a foreign language at university level using TPRS
Image via Wikipedia 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 [...]
Introducing a great website on teaching English in Japan
Here is another resource site for people interested in TPRS in Japan: Beniko Mason’s website. 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 [...]
TPRS.jp – a forum in English and Japanese for people interested in TPRS in Japan
TPRS.jp is a new forum that started up in time for the Susan Gross TPRS workshop last month in Shimabara, Kyushu, Japan. It is already very active. New forums are sprouting up almost daily! Check it out. Ask questions. Post answers. Introduce yourself. Forums exist in both English and Japanese.
TPRS Workshop in Shimabara, Kyushu – part deux
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 [...]
TPRS Workshop in Shimabara, Kyushu
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 [...]
Dealing with different proficiency levels
Image by Getty Images via @daylife 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 [...]
Dealing with short attention spans – a system
Image by exper via Flickr This post is about how I’m trying to deal with student boredom and lack of concentration in my TPRS classes. I started off doing TPRS by playing it by ear: how long should I spend on a story? Should I do mostly PQA or dictation or reading, in what quantities, [...]
All English students want to become fluent speakers… don’t they?
Image by oliver.m.wright via Flickr TPRS is a way to develop fluency in all four language skills, productive and receptive. It provides lots of comprehensible input in an entertaining and interesting way. However, there are some difficulties with teaching EFL to university students using this approach. Japanese university students have 6 years of English education [...]
TPRS
I’m starting to get into a rhythm. I definitely need writing exercises and reading exercises for my students. They need these in order to review the vocabulary and structures they’ve learned in the stories we do in class, and also to re-inforce (to re-expose them to) those vocab and structures. I don’t have time at [...]
More on using stories to teach fluency
While focusing on stories, I forgot about reading and writing. 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.
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“moretprs” yahoo group (English only)
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