The teachers greeted each other with cheery cries of “guten Morgen” as they filed into a Sweet Briar College conference room for a third day of intensive learning. By month’s end most would be back in front of their own classrooms. But on this August day, they were the students.
German teachers participating in SBC's third annual Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS) workshop demonstrate the teaching method. More photosThe class made up about half of the 29 high school and grade school German teachers from around the country who attended this summer’s weeklong Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling workshop. Organized by SBC German professor Ron Horwege, the workshop offers three different levels. Rob Williams, a high school teacher from Fairfax County and an expert in TPRS, led this group of beginners.
TPRS, which formerly was known as Total Physical Response and Storytelling, is an alternative to teaching foreign languages from a textbook. The system accelerates fluency by using repetition, physical responses, and storytelling. It places less emphasis on grammar at the beginning of the learning process.
“It approaches students the way they would be approached as children,” Horwege said. “You might walk into a classroom and start giving commands [to students] in German. They’ve never uttered a word in the language, but they start listening to it.”
The storytelling comes later, after students learn a basic vocabulary that enables them to participate in the story. For example, the teacher creates an outline by establishing that a character exists is one location, must move to another where a problem is encountered, and wind up in a third location, where the problem is resolved.
By asking questions while carefully staying within the limits of the students’ vocabulary, the teacher draws the story’s details from the class: Who is the character? Where is he from? Where does he go and how does he get there? At first, the instructor may coax only responses of “ja” or “nein,” but soon participants are throwing out nouns and verbs in German to fill in the blanks.
“The theory behind it is that is the more you can get students involved in their own learning the better they learn it. And not just for a test, we’re after the fluency,” Williams said.
As the story unfolds, the teacher uses physical gestures, repetition, and student actors to reinforce the language. Eventually students should be able to repeat the story in writing.
Williams walked his teacher-students through the storytelling process with volunteers from the class. Mary Pfeiffer, a German teacher from Medina, Ohio, played the role of instructor, giving an animated performance that brought the method to life.
TPRS supplements traditional textbook teaching, Horwege said. It more closely approximates how we naturally learn language — by listening, speaking, reading, and finally writing. Forgiving of errors at first, the method demands greater proficiency as students progress.
Sweet Briar has hosted the TPRS workshop since 2003. It is sponsored by the American Association of Teachers of German and is one of the only such German workshops in the country.
— By Jennifer McManamay,
SBC staff writer
Mary Pfeiffer (right), a German teacher from Medina, Ohio, draws responses from her students. Pfeiffer is demonstrating Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS), an alternative method of teaching foreign languages designed to accelerate fluency.
Ruth Mudrow (left) of Logan, Utah, acts the part of “Arnold,” as Mary Pfeiffer develops the story by seeking input from the class. Gestures are used to reinforce vocabulary that students learn in an earlier phase of the TPRS method.
Ruth Mudrow’s “Arnold” (left) arrives in his new home by swimming from his native Germany. By asking questions of the class, teacher Mary Pfeiffer prompts students to fill in the story’s details — such as Arnold’s mode of travel — using vocabulary they’ve already learned. Repetition and student input are critical to the TPRS method.
