While planning lessons for young learners, the teacher decided to focus on the…

Total Physical Response (TPR), developed by James Asher, is a language-teaching method built on pairing spoken instructions with physical, bodily movement — learners show they have understood a command by acting it out, rather than by answering verbally or simply listening. The method's identity rests entirely on this action-response link between language and motor activity.

Applying that idea to lesson planning: to genuinely bring this method into a lesson for young learners, the activities themselves must ask students to carry out a physical action in response to what the teacher says. Building bodily activities into the lesson creates that action-response loop, so it is the design choice that puts the method into practice.

• Dropping activities and relying on questions that expect a spoken reply keeps the exchange verbal — it checks oral response, not physical action, so it belongs to an oral question-and-answer format rather than this method.

• Designing activities around discussion in pairs or groups organises learners for collaborative talk, which is a different skill focus than pairing an instruction with a physical response.

• Adding only a listening activity exercises the receptive/auditory side of understanding but stops at hearing — without an accompanying action, the response loop this method depends on is never completed.

Weighing the four designs against that action-response requirement, adding bodily activities is the one built around learners acting out an instruction, which is what puts TPR into practice in the lesson.