There are lots of articles here, published over the years, on the history of TPRS. I just got an email from a colleague asking for some history so I sent her this. Pls. free free to add or correct:
TPRS has its roots in TPR from James Asher, who parallels in his research that of Dr. Stephen Krashen (same years – from ’70s to 1990, they knew each other, USC for Krashen and San Jose State for Asher). Then in 1990 Blaine Ray set out to create a method of teaching in 1990 based on their work. (There is some history in the 1960’s from Sandra Savignon (U of Illinois) and also Simon Belasco and others but in my own career the above names are all I needed. All talked about the radical idea (still radical!) that people learn languages UNCONSCIOUSLY by interacting w each other/negotiating meaning in real, not fake ways. Basically – they were all reincarnations of Vygotsky who was about 60 years ahead of his time. So Blaine invented TPRS storytelling in 1990. Asher and Blaine got into a dispute (threatened lawsuits were involved), and Blaine was forced to rebrand his method to now read as “Teaching Proficiency through Stories and Reading”. Asher’s work, though great, lacks the power and huge gains capable via stories, so we owe them both a lot! My career suddenly made sense once I discovered the Krashen/Ray juggernaut, which was carefully nurtured most noticeably in the Denver Public Schools from 2004 until now, to the extent that at the beginning of that period there were only five “TPRS” WL teachers out of 100 and now there are 80/100. It is worth adding that Blaine consciously set out to base a way of teaching languages on the best research he could find. According to Michael Coxon, Blaine “reached out to Krashen and asked him about how to make the Natural Approach part of classroom teaching. TPR + Natural Approach = TPRS of today. He was first introduced to Asher’s work in 1980 and started using TPR in his classroom in the early 80’s. In 1987 was about the time that Blaine took TPR actions into stories. That was the start of that connection.” Although Krashen did most of his research on ELA, he ended up being largely shunned by many less visionary members of that community and that is still happening, as we know. The depth and breadth of this shunning resembles the way Carl Jung was treated by his colleagues when he broke from Freud in the area of depth psychology. Both Krashen and Jung , like Vygotsky, were looked at as just plain wrong because they postulated that the unconscious mind was involved in dreams/language learning, where they both have their roots. Krashen’s colleagues cite him in all kinds of books on ELA but they don’t come out and embrace his work for the nuclear bomb that it really is. Those colleagues talk the Krashen talk but don’t walk the walk in their classrooms. It is due, again, in my opinion, to a lack of being able to fully understand and apply the fact that languages are acquired unconsciously. So most language teachers of today force kids to think about the language and, since thinking is a conscious and not unconscious function, no gains are registered in those classrooms despite decades of obvious failure. Most ELA classrooms of today teach an overly watered down version of Krashen and so it is only in the WL area that Krsahen’s work really finds expression, and that by perhaps only .1% of practicing professionals in the U.S., who have grabbed onto TPRS like life preservers in a storm. Interestingly, schools are actively looking around for such teachers, so the prognosis is good for those of us who grabbed the life preservers while the rest of the massive WL ship keeps tilting, more and more over on its side every day, just waiting for the final collapse into the waiting Ocean of Oblivion of Teaching Methods That Didn’t Work. Our careers were saved by Krahen and Blaine and other great leaders like Susan Gross and Jason Fritze and Carol Gaab, and now we are off and running, loving our jobs, and Mr. Jones is aware that something is happening here but he doesn’t know what it is.
Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn9ZB76KZLI