Students in Class II sing a song, 'Head and shoulders, knees and toes'. They…

Concept: Total Physical Response (TPR) is a language-teaching method developed by James Asher in which learners are given spoken commands or instructions and show they have understood by performing the matching physical action. This mirrors how young children acquire their first language — they listen and physically respond well before they can produce speech themselves.

Application: In this classroom, the teacher gives the students a sequence of spoken/sung words - head, shoulders, knees, toes - and the students respond by touching each corresponding body part as they hear it. Each word is directly linked to a specific bodily action that the students perform to show they have understood it.

• Audio-lingual method: built on repeated pattern drills and mimicry of sentence structures, not on acting out individual words with body movements.

• Communicative Language Teaching: centres on meaningful interaction and real-life communicative tasks between learners, not on physically demonstrating each word.

• Eclectic method: combines techniques from multiple approaches as suited to the lesson, without being defined by any single word-to-action pairing.

Because the technique described links each spoken word directly to a physical movement that demonstrates comprehension, the teacher is using Total Physical Response.