A Study On The Application Of Total Physical Response Approach To English Vocabulary Teaching In Primary School

It is universally acknowledged that English is very important owing to the development of globalization.As a result,English teaching in primary school is getting more and more attention in China in recent years.And vocabulary is regarded as the foundation of English learning.However,currently there are many problems in the actual teaching of vocabulary.Some traditional teaching methods cannot meet the requirements of the development of practice.Meanwhile,teachers try to apply various teaching methods to solve the existing problems in the process of English teaching.Among these methods,Total Physical Response(TPR)approach is widely acclaimed.TPR was put forward by James Asher,an American psychology professor in the 1960 s.TPR approach attempts to teach language through physical activities.It creates a stress-free environment to make students become more confident and relaxed in their English learning.This study tries to apply TPR teaching approach to vocabulary teaching in primary school.The study aims to discuss and answer the following three questions:Question 1: Compared with the traditional method,does TPR approach stimulate students’ interest in learning vocabulary?Question 2: Which method is more beneficial for vocabulary retention, traditional method or TPR?Question 3: Compared with the traditional method,does TPR approach improve students’ proficiency of English vocabulary?The experiment lasted 16 weeks from September to December in 2018 in order to answer these three research questions.It was carried out in Houying Primary School,Haicheng.There were 60 pupils from two parallel classes in Grade 3 which were named the control class(CC)and the experimental class(EC).EC was taught with TPR approach while CC was still taught with traditional method.All the data was collected through pre-questionnaire,post-questionnaire,delayed test,pre-test,post-test,interview and analyzed by SPSS statistical software.The experimental results show that TPR teaching approach can promote English learning.It can improve students’ proficiency of English vocabulary.What’s more,the application of TPR approach makes students more interested in English.And it’s more beneficial for vocabulary retention.As a result,compared with the traditional teaching method,TPR approach can make great contributions to improving students’ English vocabulary learning.In the light of these results,the thesis puts forward some detailed suggestions which are expected to make great contributions to English teaching and future researches.