What do babies and teaching a language have in common? Read on

(Sentinel photo by Magdalene Landegent) Spanish teacher Elizabeth Rogers explains a learning activity where students use a flyswatter to slap the correct vocabulary word. Rogers, who teaches at Gehlen Catholic School, teaches with a unique method derived from understanding how babies learn to speak. [Click to enlarge]

Would you make your baby diagram sentences?

Or would you expect your 1 year old to order his or her own food at a restaurant?

Not likely.

That's why Elizabeth Rogers, or Seņorita Eli as her students know her, is using the Total Physical Response (TPR) method to teach high school Spanish at Gehlen Catholic Schools.

TPR is a method of teaching language based on the idea that humans are born with a way of learning language -- that adults can learn language the way babies do.

Babies spend months watching people around them and forming connections between spoken language and the physical item or action that goes with it.

Then they begin to speak.

In the same way, TPR students begin learning vocabulary connected to physical actions and objects.

For example, when Rogers introduces students to the word "pluma" she pretends to write -- acting out the word "pen."

They learn how words fit together with storytelling. Rogers tells a simple story and uses a physical gesture to represent the words in the story.

"Every vocabulary word has an action. It helps students visualize what they're learning," Rogers said. "It's especially good for kinesthetic learners (people who learn best through movement)."

What she doesn't want is students to be attached to their English-Spanish dictionary.

"I'd rather they access the information from what they know," she said.

After Rogers tells a story with the class, she gives them simple yes and no questions, and they circle their answers on a sheet of paper.

Once the students have learned some vocabulary, Rogers will tell them another story adding some new words.

"They do the actions to the words they know, and they start coming to conclusions about what they don't know," she explained.

The students begin to speak Spanish gradually.

"A lot of it is listening," Rogers said. "You don't expect students to spit it out right away."

Rogers directs her class to act out stories, using props and pretending different parts of the room are different locations like Antarctica or the grocery store.

Slowly, Rogers introduces the grammar and technical workings of language. By then, the students instinctively know the basics of how to put a sentence together.

Other teaching methods that begin with grammar are good for building writing skills, Rogers said, but TPR helps students learn how to speak well.

"I think the most important thing is to be able to communicate verbally," she said. "If a student runs into someone on the street that speaks Spanish, it won't take them a minute to try to form a sentence."

TPR is best known for teaching early-level students, but Rogers said it is also helpful in the higher-level courses.

"Later we use huge stories that are more developed, using different verb tenses," she said.

How is TPR working at Gehlen? So far so good, Rogers said.

She didn't encounter TPR and TPRS (Total Physical Response: Storytelling) until she was studying Spanish at Northwestern College in Orange City.

"My freshman year, I had a friend that could speak better Spanish than I could, and he wasn't even a Spanish major," Rogers said. "He had a teacher that used TPR."

A Spanish professor encouraged her to explore different methods of teaching spanish. She observed a Spanish I classroom where it was used.

"The kids were speaking so well," Rogers remembered. "They were speaking more fluently than kids in Spanish IV at my school."

Then she attended a TPR conference. She and the other attendees learned how to speak Polish.

"I was blown away," Rogers said. "It makes you proud to be able to learn it quickly."

As she continued at college, she broke away from the Spanish teaching norm and kept exploring TPR.

"At another conference, I learned French. That sold me," she said.

Rogers ended up student teaching with TPR with a former Gehlen teacher Sarah Wrather in Orange City.

Then she was hired to teach Spanish at Gehlen this year.

She's excited about offering a different method in teaching the language.

"I never had that experience," she said. "And I think it makes learning Spanish more fun."