An Empirical Study On The Application Of Total Physical Response Approach To English Vocabulary Teaching In Primary Schools

Total Physical Response(TPR)approach was proposed in the1960 s,by James Asher,a psychology professor in America.The TPR approach advocates linking language with behavior.It teaches foreign languages in vivid and intuitive forms,such as action performance,physical objects and pictures.Based on input hypothesis,emotion filtering hypothesis and left and right brain division theory,the TPR approach not only creates a relaxing learning atmosphere for students,but also provides sufficient comprehensible input and multiple sensory experiences through various teaching forms,such as body movements,physical objects and pictures.Therefore,the TPR approach can reduce the students’ tension and anxiety,improve their interest in vocabulary learning,stimulate the left and right brain to work at the same time,and eventually improve the learning effect.The TPR approach has been widely used in second language teaching since it was put forward.There are many researches on the theory and application of the TPR approach at home and abroad,but there are few empirical studies on the application of English vocabulary teaching in primary school students.This paper makes an empirical study on the application of the TPR approach in English vocabulary teaching in the fourth grade of Qifeng School,and tries to explore its teaching effect.The theoretical basis of this experiment is input hypothesis,emotion filtering hypothesis and left and right brain division theory.This study aims to study the following two questions through questionnaire survey and experimental studies:1.What are the effects of the TPR approach on students’ interest in English vocabulary learning?2.How does the TPR approach affect the learning effect of English vocabulary?This study takes two parallel class students with comparable English level in the fourth grade of Qifeng School as the experimental subjects,and one class is the control class,the other is the experimental class.In the experiment,the control class still adopts the traditional approach,while the experimental class adopts the TPR approach.The experiment lasts for 16 weeks.Before and after the experiment,the author conducted a questionnaire survey and a vocabulary test in both classes to compare the students’ interest and learning effect in English vocabulary learning in the control class and the experimental class.By using SPSS21.0 statistical software to analyze the questionnaire survey and vocabulary test statistics of the control class and the experimental class before and after the experiment,this study found that:1.The TPR approach can improve students’ interest in vocabulary learning.2.The TPR approach can improve students’ vocabulary learning effect.Therefore,the TPR approach is suitable for the pupils who are active and good at imitation,and eventually can improve the English vocabulary learning effect of the pupils.However,there are still some limitations in this study,such as short experimental time(only 16 weeks)and limited samples(only 80 students),which should be improved in the future studies.