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Russian Language Journal

Keywords

Total Physical Response (TPR), James Asher, verbs of motion, experiential learning, outdoor learning, pandemic, COVID

Abstract

The necessity to move my Russian as a second language (L2) classroom in an event tent during the “main” pandemic year encouraged me to create lessons engaging students’ movement and thus rediscover the Total Physical Response (TPR) method. This article presents the case for using TPR-inspired teaching as a mode to be considered in instruction of Russian verbs of motion (VoM). TPR, a teaching method and language acquisition theory suggested by James Asher in the 1960s, has further evolved in TPR role-playing and TPR storytelling and is used in L2 instruction today (e.g., Cook, 2008, p. 132; Davidheiser, 2002; Elliott & Yountichi, 2009, p. 432). TPR has been proven to help develop connection between speech and action and therefore to boost vocabulary learning and oral speech development and to lower stress. Instructors may find TPR appealing for teaching Russian VoM because “it would allow them to observe students’ comprehension and possible sources of confusion directly through learner reenactment of motion events during production exercises and would also assist teaching in providing visually accessible illustrations of VoM usage in addition to verbalized explanations” (Hasko, 2009, p. 356). Using TPR as inspiration, I take it a step further by advocating for a broader understanding of tying movement to language learning and consider TPR-inspired activities as part of embodied tactile/kinesthetic learning. Relying on my colleagues’ (Bidoshi & Nemtchinova, 2022; Bondarenko, 2023; Elliott & Yountichi, 2009; Kogan, 2021) and my own teaching experience as well as on concepts (such as “embodied cognition”) and evidence that we can trace in the referenced literature (e.g., Macedonia & Knösche, 2011; Macedonia et al., 2020; Mathias et al., 2021; Olfaz, 2019), I discuss different instructional activities combining movement-based teaching with communicative-, task-, acting-out-, and game-playing-based instruction to demonstrate how teaching can be made more dynamic by engaging learners’ psychomotor skills, ultimately encoding new linguistic patterns related to Russian VoM into long-term knowledge.

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