A Study On The Application Of Total Physical Response In Primary School Low Grade English Classroom Teaching

Against the background of national curriculum reform,primary school English teaching still sticks to the everlasting rationale of being student-centered and uphold the aim to cultivate students' interest.This is considered a way to integrate core competencies and values into English teaching and learning.In order to achieve this,teachers working on the forefront have always been endeavoring to search for better ways to teach and improve teaching efficiency.Famous American psychologist James Asher put forward Total Physical Response(TPR for short)in 1966.This is a method to teach language with physical actions as assistance.Language is presented in various forms to the learners and the learners acquire the potential rules through all possible means by internalizing the information through audio and visual sensory.In the meanwhile,TPR advocates learning in a relaxing and joyful environment so that the students' emotional burdens could be dramatically relieved.It first combs the literature from aboard to our home country and offers some guiding principles and teaching procedures for reference.At present,overseas and domestic scholars have been doing both theoretical and empirical studies in this field,but domestic studies are still scarce and need to be enriched.The empirical application of TPR still needs exploring and testing.This study establishes an analytical framework from psychological,biological and cognitive foundations and investigated into the application of TPR to lower-grade primary school students.Then the researcher tries to carry out the research through how to give a lesson with TPR,classroom observation of both the control group and the experimental group and the statistical analysis of the tests and also some interviews with the aim to find out how the teacher and the students perceive TPR in real application.The major findings are:(1)for lower-grade primary school students,TPR turns out to be a viable method;(2)from the test results it could be seen that TPR could improve students' listening and reading ability more effectively than the traditional methods do;(3)students in TPR class are more actively involved and motivated;(4)students show strong recognition towards TPR in language learning;(5)there are also problems in language teaching for lower-grade primary school students,such as how to keep disciple and motivate students who are quite quiet or rather introvert.