Teaching Young EFL Learners New Vocabulary: A Comparison of the Efficiency of Traditional and Personalized TPR Strategies

Abstract

This paper proposes a personalized teaching strategy based on Total Physical Response (TPR) to acquire new words. TPR combines target language items with semantically corresponding gestures conducive to learners understanding and memorizing them by repeatedly executing commands from their teachers. One limitation of TPR is that it does not allow students any freedom to creatively execute an order in ways that seem to be more interesting and meaningful to them. To address these disadvantages, we have integrated the TPR teaching strategy with a personalized teaching strategy. The participants of the experimental group (EG) performed their movements creatively; they integrated the movements with the target words to produce video productions. The participants in the control group (CG) followed the dance video supplied with the textbook. The results of the study demonstrated that the personalized TPR teaching strategy is effective and helpful for recalling the meaning of English vocabulary for higher-level students. The results of this study can benefit K-12 teachers to determine and incorporate best TPR practices for students of different levels.