Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling

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Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling , formerly known as Total Physical Response Storytelling, or TPRS for short, is a method for teaching any world language in schools, including Spanish and French. Mr. Blaine Ray created this method by combining James Asher's Total Physical Response system with funny stories to help students apply the words learned. These stories are complemented with little books, identical in Spanish, French, and German besides the language and the setting. Some include The Voyage of His Life and Almost Dead. Blaine Ray is a Spanish teacher whose main teaching idea is that whatever is best for the majority of the students is the best way to teach.

TPRS is a movement towards building language proficiency in the use of grammatical structures through reading stories in addition to the oral storytelling for which TPRS is well-known. Originally incorporating seven basic steps, TPRS now has three main steps to the process:

1. Introduction of target grammatical structures through personalized questions and answers directed to individual students,
2. Telling of the main story using a circling technique of asking questions (resulting in multiple repetitions of the target structures), and
3. Reading stories where the target structures are used in various contexts.

TPRS is based on the importance of comprehensible input as the key factor in developing fluency in the target language and is supported by Dr. Stephen Krashen's research.