The Application Of Total Physical Response In English Vocabulary Teaching In Primary School

In recent years,English teaching in primary school plays an increasing important roles during the learning process for Chinese children.English teachers at home have searched and applied a quantity of teaching approaches,but the majority of them have used traditional ways in practice.They have taught students by leading students to read loudly after teachers without communication,and by memorizing boring phonetic alphabet mechanically.As a result,these methods have made the students feel boring,lose learning interests and the efficiency of learning is low.Among the teaching approaches,Total Physical Response,(abbreviation TPR,)is in accordance with children's psychological and physiological characteristics.Children will benefit from this approach greatly in language acquisition and development.However,TPR method has never been applied in my area of teaching.Therefore,I have used this methodology to teach pupils and conducted an experiment on it.In 1960 s,TPR approach was originated by American educator James Asher.Based on the teaching approach on children's acquisition of their mother tongue,it has been widely used in thousands of classrooms worldwide.Asher holds that learners acquire a language and coordinate the target language with physical actions in a relaxing atmosphere.The TPR approach can help students understand the language better and quicker,memorize the vocabulary more effective and improve their sense of self-esteem.However,this approach has never been used in the primary school where I work.The aim of my research is to solve the problem as follows: :1.Whether TPR approach is helpful to improve learners' vocabulary learning interest?2.Whether TPR approach is effective to enhance learners' language ability?Combined with the actual teaching situation in primary English teaching currently,the author try to testify the effects of TPR method on learner's vocabulary learning interest and learning proficiency by using questionnaires and tests.Participants in this research are from Shahe No.2 Primary School,Baotou,Inner Mongolia Province.The sample consists of 80 students from two parallel classes in Grade Three.In the research,they're randomly divided into the experiment class and the control class.All the data collected from questionnaires and tests are analyzed through SPSS.According to the contrastive analysis of experimental data,it can be seen that vocabulary learning interest and language ability of students in experimental class has been improved.This experiment provides a good example for vocabulary teaching.