Author: Penelope Ellin
Ellin, Penelope, 2019 Primary school Indonesian teachers' perception of the benefits of Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS), Flinders University, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
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The Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS) Method was created in the 1990s by Blaine Ray, an American high school Spanish teacher and has been used by second language teachers worldwide to teach languages ever since. The TPRS method is currently being used by some South Australian primary school teachers in classroom practices to teach Indonesian as a second language. However, the current literature is dominated by studies on the use of the TPRS to teach English or Spanish in secondary and tertiary education contexts outside Australia and there is thus a lack of research on the use of the TPRS in primary school contexts in Australia, particularly in South Australia. This current research was therefore conducted to explore the perceptions of five (5) Indonesian language teachers about their perceived benefits and shortcomings, if any, of using TPRS in their primary schools’ Indonesian language classrooms in South Australia. Based on analyses of the data collected from one-to-one semi-structured interviews with five Indonesian language teachers from five different primary schools in South Australia, the findings reveal that TPRS is positively perceived by participating teachers as being beneficial for developing students’ vocabulary and language retention, increasing their reading ability as well as improving their engagement in Indonesian language learning. These findings confirmed what the literature has suggested so far and helped build primary school teachers’ confidence in using the TPRS method more frequently to teach Indonesian and/or any other second language(s). However, interview data analyses reveal that the participating teachers perceived both pedagogical and contextual challenges in using TPRS to teach Indonesian, to which this current study made recommendations to address. Despite this current study’s limited scope and methodological limitations, its findings are significant as they contribute to both the second language teaching practice and the literature on the use of TPRS in South Australian primary school contexts to teach Indonesian as a second language. Further research into the use of TPRS in other school contexts outside South Australia would help provide more insights into how best to implement the TPRS into Indonesian language classrooms in South Australia and beyond.
Keywords: TPRS, Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling, Primary language classes
Subject: Education thesis
Thesis type: Masters
Completed: 2019
School: College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Supervisor: Dr Mai Ngo