Total Physical Response Method for Mastering English Vocabulary
Andang Saehu, Ice Sariyati and Muhibbin Syah
UIN Sunan Gunung Djati Bandung, Bandung, Indonesia
Keywords: Characteristics, elementary school children.
Abstract: The difficulty of teachers in teaching English to children pushed the writers to conduct a community service in
the form of the training of vocabulary mastery to elementary school children using total physical response (TPR)
method. This training was aimed to introduce the method to the teacher to make the students interested, happy
and easy when learning English, especially to master vocabulary. In this training, the participants involved were
36 students of the third grade. To evaluate the achievement of this training program, pre-test and post-test were
used to know the students’ ability before and after being given the treatment. Besides, observation by field notes
was employed to know the students’ response to the implementation of this method. From data analysis, the
result revealed that TPR method is effective to be used to improve the students’ English vocabulary mastery as
the score of post-test was significantly improved from the one of pre-test. Besides, the result from observation
showed that generally, the students had good response toward the use of the method. It means this method can
be applied in teaching English vocabulary to children by the teachers even by the parents when teaching their
children English vocabulary at home.
1 INTRODUCTION
This study investigates the form of teaching English
vocabulary to elementary school children using total
physical response (TPR) method. It is the results of
researches that show TPR method is the most suitable
one to be applied to teach vocabulary to young
learners as this method offers them enjoyable and
active roles in the learning experience as one of the
principles and best practices for teaching English to
elementary learners (McCloskey, 2003). Besides,
TPR method has enhanced students’ motivation and
interests of elementary school in Taiwan in learning
English (Hsu and Lin, 2012).
Therefore, this paper is aimed to introduce TPR to
the teacher to make the students interested, happy and
easy when learning English, especially to master
vocabulary. Moreover, it is to convince whether TPR
method is effective to be applied in teaching English
vocabulary to elementary school children and to
know if the students respond well to the application
of the method.
Hopefully, the TPR method used in this teaching
English vocabulary can minimize the students stress.
Besides, the teacher can use it to enrich the teaching
method, so he or she has various methods to be
applied in teaching English, especially English
vocabulary. Furthermore, the teacher can introduce
TPR Method to the students’ parents to make them be
able to apply this method to teach English to their
children, so it can be created the culture of learning to
improve human resources as early as possible.
2 THE TEORETICAL
FRAMEWORK
TPR that is introduced firstly by Asher, a professor
emeritus of psychology at San José State University
is designed based on how the children learn their
mother tongue (Neupane, 2008). In implementing
TPR method, Richard and Rodgers (1987) state that
the learners have a main role as a listener and a player.
They believe that teachers play an active role as
models that decide what should be taught and what
learning materials should be delivered to students in
the classrooms. They claim that teachers should also
learn from how parents provide feedback for their
children. At the first place teachers can give some
corrections. As children grow, teachers tolerate
mistakes made by the students.
On the other hand, there are some types of
vocabulary that must be mastered by second language
learners, such as single words, set phrases, variable
phrases, phrasal verbs and idiom (Folse, 2008).
Saehu, A., Sariyati, I. and Syah, M.
Total Physical Response Method for Mastering English Vocabulary.
In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Sociology Education (ICSE 2017) - Volume 1, pages 73-76
ISBN: 978-989-758-316-2
Copyright © 2018 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
73

Single words include vocabulary that is more
commonly used than others. Set phrases are words
that can change, such as on the other hand which
cannot be replaced by in the other hand or in other
hands or in other fingers despite that the alternatives
are semantically related.
Variable phrase are classification that consists of
similar components with the use of personal
pronouns, possessive adjectives, or word order. For
example, in the expression of ‘it has come to our
attention that’, the word ‘our’ can be replaced by
‘my’. Meanwhile, phrasal verbs are a combination of
a verb followed by particles, such as take up, take
down, take on, take off, take in, take out, take away,
take back, and take over. Idiom is a collection of
vocabulary that the meanings of each word are
different from the overall meanings. For example, ‘a
person lets the cat out of the bag’ means that someone
reveals the secret (Folse, 2008).
Meanwhile, vocabulary in a text can be
categorized into four levels, namely high frequency
words, academic vocabulary, technical vocabulary
and low frequency words (Nation, 2001). High
frequency words are vocabulary which are unmarked
in the text, including in, for, the, of, a, and many
others. These words are mostly found almost 80% in
spoken and written texts. The second is academic
vocabulary which are taken from academic text and
printed in bold (9%), while technical vocabulary are
in italic in the text (5%) and are easily found because
they are written in Latin or Greek (Chung & Nation,
2003). The last is low frequency words which are
only few of them found in the text.
McCarten (2007) argue that there are many parts
of vocabulary that can be learned (meaning, forms,
collocations, connotations, grammatical features, and
so on), and it is essential for teachers to introduce
those parts to students from highly used vocabulary
to low frequency vocabulary. Teachers should repeat
the vocabulary so that students can acquire the
vocabulary, and teachers should also vary their ways
of teaching the vocabulary to avoid boredom. He adds
that teachers need to help students understand that
learning is a gradual process that goes from little
things, improves over time, and stimulates them to
seek additional information on their own, making the
learning experience a means to meet its own
particular needs.
Meanwhile, in education, the term children (as
adapted from Harmer, 2007) is usually used for
learners between the ages of 2 and 14. Phillips (1993)
describes Young Learners as children from the first
year of formal schooling (aged five or six years) to
eleven or twelve. As a language learner, according to
Scott and Ytreberg (1990), children have
characteristics that teachers should consider in
teaching them.
Some of these characteristics as proposed by
Harmer (2001: 38) are: they respond to meaning even
though they do not understand the words and often
learn indirectly; their understanding comes not only
from explanations but also from what they see and
hear and it is important for them to have a chance to
touch and interact; they are generally enthusiastic to
learn and have a curiosity about the world around
them; they need the attention and approval of their
teachers as well as they are interested in talking about
themselves and respond well to learning involving
oneself and his life; and they are less attentive, except
on very interesting activities, they can quickly get
bored after interacting after 10 minutes or so.
From the above characteristics, it can be deduced
that children learn a foreign language in the same way
as they learn the mother tongue. It is as stated by
Clarke (2009) that, the activity of helping babies and
toddlers learn English as a second language is no
different from the activity to help those who learn
English as their first language.
Because the target students in the study are
elementary school students, the type of vocabulary
taught is single word vocabulary (one word
vocabulary) about numbers (1 to 10), colors, objects
in the classroom, animals, and fruits. McCharten
(2007) argues that teachers should introduce
vocabulary bit by bit, starting with the most frequent,
useful, and easiest vocabulary, the teacher should
repeat the vocabulary often because the student must
recognize the word or phrase many times before the
acquisition occurs, and teachers need to vary the
teaching so that the exercises are not boring and the
learning styles are different.
3 METHODS
To find out whether the TPR method proved to be
effective in improving English vocabulary mastery
for elementary school students, quantitative methods
with quasi-experimental design were used because
the participants involved were not randomly selected.
In addition, to know the student's response to TPR
method, qualitative method by observation and field
notes was also used in this study.
Participants involved in this research were third
grade students of elementary school. Meanwhile, in
conducting the treatment, the researcher provided
training on the mastery of English vocabulary items
(single word vocabulary items) on numbers, colors,
ICSE 2017 - 2nd International Conference on Sociology Education
74

objects in the classroom, animals and fruits during
four meetings by applying the TPR method and by
introducing several instructional languages.
To evaluate the success rate of the training
program, the pre-test and post-test measures were
used to determine students' ability before and after
treatment. In addition, observation activities were
conducted using field notes to determine the students'
response to the use of this method.
4 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
4.1 The results of Pre-test and Post-test
After obtaining the pre-test and post-test score of the
students, paired t-test using SPSS for windows was
used and the results are shown in Table 1.
Table 1: Paired Samples Test.
df
Sig. (2-
tailed)
Pair 1
Pretest – Posttest
35
.000
As shown in Table 1, there was a significant
result (2-tailed) with 0.00 which is less than 0.05
meaning that the null hypothesis was rejected. This
indicates that there is a significant difference in the
means between pre-test and post-test among the thir
grade students. This implies that English vocabulary
mastery among the respondents improved
significantly. Thus, it is clear that the TPR method is
an effective method to increase Vocabulary mastery.
This is indicated by the results of students' ability
after being given treatment method.
4.2 The results of Observation
Based on data obtained from observations using field
notes, the results show that students respond well to
the use of the Total Physical Response method in
teaching English vocabulary with the following
indicators:
The first, generally, the students eagerly follow
the learning activities and make a loud voice. There
are some female students who are still shy and soft-
spoken also there are a few male students who act
excessively. Secondly, the students looked happy,
comforted and laughed and they understood both the
material and the instructional language well after
being given examples and explanations. There are
still some students who hesitate to do it. Third, the
students seemed to focus on the learning activities
although sometimes the attention was somewhat
distracted by other class students peeping through the
windows, watching the learning activities that might
interest them out of the classroom.
Thus, the results of observation showed that the
use of TPR method is very useful to reduce the stress
of students, as proposed by Shearon (2005). In
addition, the data prove that students learn more when
they feel relaxed.
The theory of Slattery (2004) which states that
children acquire language by seeing, hearing, doing
something and imitating, is also found in data
obtained from field notes. For example, it is shown by
the number of students who perform the teacher's
instructions perfectly after the teacher becomes an
example model and repeats his instructions several
times. This means students learn a foreign language
based on the way they learn the mother tongue by
giving a physical response to the initial speech via the
command in accordance with his explanation
Neupane (2008).
In addition, the findings based on observations
indicate that the TPR method is suitable to be applied
in teaching children because they like to get up from
their seats and move around. This reason is consistent
with that of Levine (2005), in which the character of
the child acquires and learns the language while
moving and engages in fun language activities.
5 CONCLUSION
Based on the results of data analysis, it can be
concluded that the TPR method has been proven
effective in improving the vocabulary mastery of the
English language of elementary school students,
especially the third grade students. This can be seen
from the result of post-test of student which
significantly increase after given treatment method of
TPR. The TPR method fits perfectly with the
character of the child because they like to move and
get bored quickly if they just sit on a chair. In
addition, it is supported by their good response to the
TPR method
The TPR method can motivate children to be
interested in learning English vocabulary because this
method is very entertaining them. This is evidenced
by a sense of joy and enthusiasm and often laughs as
they undergo a learning activity although this method
may cause some students to overreact as they are too
happy to participate in learning activities.
Total Physical Response Method for Mastering English Vocabulary
75

REFERENCES
Chung, T. M., Nation, I. S. P., 2003. Technical vocabulary
in specialised texts. Reading in a Foreign Language.
Volume 15, No. 2.
Clarke, P., 2009. Supporting children learning English as a
second language in the early years (birth to six years).
Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority.
Retrieved May 27, 2015, from
http://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/earlyyears/supporting_chil
dren_learning_esl.pdfhttp://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/early
years/supporting_children_learning_esl.pdf.
Folse, K. S., 2004. Myths about teaching and learning
second language vocabulary: What recent research
says. TESL Reporter 37(2), p 1-13.
Harmer, J., 2001, p. 38. The practice of English language
teaching. Longman.
Harmer, J., 2007. How to teach English. Essex: Pearson
Longman.
Hsu, H., Lin, C., 2012. The effects of total physical
response on English functional vocabulary learning for
resource classroom students in the elementary school
(National Changhua University of Education, Taiwan).
Abstract retrieved February 9, 2015 from
http://conference.nie.edu.sg/paper/new
converted/0600466.pdf.
Levine, L. N., 2005. Unique characteristics of young
learners. Retrieved May 28, 2015 from
http://home.comcast.net/~educo-
atlanta/Handouts05/UniqueCharacteristics_HO_LNLT
ESOLArabia05.pdf.
McCharten, J., 2007. Teaching vocabulary. Cambridge
University Press.
McCloskey, M. L., 2003. Principles and best practices for
teaching English to elementary learners. Arkansas
TESOL. P1-9. Retrieved June 4, 2015 from
http://home.comcast.net/~mlmccloskey/Handouts03/Pr
inciples_of_ESL_Arkansas.pdf.
Nation, I. S. P., 2001. Learning vocabulary in another
language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Neupane, G., 2008. Act, don't explain: Total Physical
Response at work. Journal of NELTA Vol. 13 No. 1-2.
Phillips, S., 1993. Young learners. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Richards, J. C., Rodgers., 1987. Approaches and methods
in language teaching. US: Cambridge University Press.
Scott, W. A., Ytreberg, L. H., 1990. Teaching English to
children. New York: Longman.
Slattery, M., 2004. Vocabulary activities. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
ICSE 2017 - 2nd International Conference on Sociology Education
76