An Application Of TPR Approach To English Vocabulary Teaching In Primary School

Vocabulary is the teaching focus of primary school, and also the most difficult problem for teachers and students. The traditional vocabulary teaching method doesn’t work effectively because it can’t stimulate students’ interest of vocabulary learning. This paper tries to apply TPR approach to vocabulary teaching to solve the problem. Total Physical Response(TPR) advocates learning through physical actions. Young learners should learn a foreign language confidently and happily, just as the process of acquiring their native language. This teaching method conforms to young learners’ psychological and physical characteristics.This study applies TPR approach to perform an empirical study on primary school vocabulary teaching. The research questions of this paper are as follows:1. Compared with traditional method, can TPR approach stimulate students’ interest in learning vocabulary?2. Compared with traditional method, can TPR approach improve students’ vocabulary proficiency?3. Is TPR approach more effective for vocabulary “short-term memory” or “long-term memory” ?The participants are from Zhansi Primary School in Jinzhou. It takes four months to conduct the research. There are 80 pupils from two parallel classes which are named the control class(CC) and the experimental class(EC). EC is taught with TPR approach; CC is still taught with traditional method. At the beginning of experiment, the pre-questionnaire and pre-test are used in CC and EC. During the experiment, the immediate test and delayed test are used in CC and EC. At the end of experiment, the post-questionnaire and post-test were used in both classes. After the experiment, the author collects and analyzes the data of experiment. The analysis of this research indicates that applying TPR approach can raise students’ interest in learning English greatly. Even though there is no obvious difference between EC and CC in short-term memory under different vocabulary teaching methods, the TPR approach exerts an effective function on the long-term memory. The application of TPR approach can improve students’ vocabulary proficiency better than traditional vocabulary teaching method.The paper compromises five chapters. The first chapter is introduction. The second chapter concerns about literature review. The third chapter is about the research methodology. The fourth chapter is about data collection and analysis. The fifth chapter is conclusion.