Talking Language Acquisition: Comprehensible Input, TPRS, Grammar, and More with Dr. Karen Lichtman

Dr. Lichtman joined me on episode 38 of “Growing With Proficiency: The Podcast” and shared her research findings on language acquisition, specifically focusing on TPRS. We also explored their implications for our classrooms.

This conversation is bound to be both fascinating and incredibly helpful as we navigate the decisions we make in our teaching practices. You’ll gain insights on what to prioritize and what to scale back on in our lessons, the role of grammar, and how we can improve our assessment methods for our learners.

In episode 38, prepare for some assumptions to be challenged as we dived deep into understanding how our students truly acquire language. By gaining a clearer understanding of this process, we can make more informed decisions that benefit our students’ language learning journeys. I guarantee that you’ll learn as much from this conversation as I have.

In this post, I highlight parts of our conversation. To hear the full conversation, click here or listen above.

Textbooks and Language Acquisition 

When I started teaching, I really thought that students acquired the language through the clear sequence of the textbook. But, oh, was I wrong. Karen and I talked about this and how there’s a gap between the research and teaching practice in our classrooms.

Karen shared that when she first started out teaching, she would see that students did not remember things taught from one class to another. She was then invited to a workshop where she learned about how much repetition and how much input we need at the beginning levels to do a language.

Like many teachers early in their teaching, she didn’t quite trust the process of comprehensible input and included grammar as well. Then, I asked Karen to share the differences between traditional teaching, comprehensible input, and TPRS.

Traditional Teaching

Karen explained that basically it is what most textbooks provide, or maybe even all textbooks. It means you’re going to be introduced to some sort of vocabulary list and grammar point. Then, you’re going to learn to mechanically do the grammar point and use the vocabulary list to have some conversations on the topic that they have provided. It’s very focused on students talking and writing. 

TPRS

TPR stands for Total Physical Response. That’s the idea that the teacher gives commands, and the students do them. The idea is that you use TPR with beginners, so that they can demonstrate that they’re comprehending you by movements and by speaking. It was developed based on how parents and young children interact.

Karen continued to explain that that grew into storytelling, where you use gestures to help comprehension. You make up a little story with your students as actors and act that out and retell the story. TPRS is sort of a specific brand of comprehensible input. 

Comprehensible Input

Now, comprehensible input is much broader, so it still includes TPRS, but it also includes more movie talk and picture talk, especially since we have so many online resources. It also includes just having conversations with your students and special person interviews. Listen to more about this in episode 38. We also talked about how it is a lot like what we do as parents with our children.

Karen also shared that there actually can be some middle ground. So, people who just use the language in their classroom, we would say they’re doing non-targeted comprehensible input. But, you can also do targeted comprehensible input.

The Research

Since about 2009, Karen has been collecting TPRS research. Her favorite studies are the ones that compare TPRS to traditional teaching or some other method. What you get with this research is lots of different age groups, lots of different schools, lots of different classes, lots of different teachers, sometimes the same teacher, sometimes different teachers. In about two thirds of the studies, the TPRS classes do better.

Karen believes the message is, even if you’re not teaching to the test and if you’re doing comprehensible input, your students will do as well or better than the students who get the traditional. This is because the traditional students didn’t learn every single grammar point they were taught either, because it’s impossible. They forget traditional teaching much faster than they forget comprehensible input.

Increasing Language Acquisition 

I, then, asked Karen what are the things that we should be doing more and what we should be doing less in order to get our students to become more proficient in the language. Listen to episode 38 to hear her answer.

We also talked about how assessment is more for us than for our students because assessment is really telling us what we need to work more on. We then dived into how to assess fluency and its importance.

One thing that Karen shared was that TPRS people have been doing free writes for a very long time. This is where you have your students write for 10 minutes, or a given amount of time. Then, you try to graph that over time as they get more fluent. For example, oh, you got 20 words, you got 40 words, you got 200 words? That is a good way to assess for fluency.

Listen to our whole conversation on your favorite podcast player or here,