No more TPR for me. It has an artificial feeling to it and, like circling, brings up that engagement of the conscious faculty of the learner in the moments of comprehension, which conscious engagement interrupts the flow of the learner’s focus only on meaning, which is a colossal mistake in this work, if I understand the research correctly**. It’s just a bother.
Yes I do light TPR during a story, but I do not do it separately so that my students can learn yet another list. I only do it to further comprehension. I make instructional decisions very much on intuition, and TPR is in my view best done very lightly during instruction – just airbrushed in, so that the supremely important focus on meaning – which alone drives acquisition – can be uninterrupted and unfettered. Thus we respect the natural process.
*https://benslavic.com/blog/hit-list-of-8/er
**as I understand it, Krashen doesn’t say that we should “kind of intermittently” be focused on the meaning if we are to acquire the language, but rather be fully focused on the meaning of what is being said to the exclusion of any injected conscious focus by the instructor on anything. This is how I read Krashen. We can keep the learner’s focus 100% on meaning via airbrushing TPR, but once we do that in a more heavy-handed way, we lose, disrupt, meddle with the unconscious factor. If we don’t keep EVERYTHING IN THE REALM OF THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND, then acquisition is grossly hampered. So “airbrushing” in input – conveying meaning via a very fast – super fast and therefore unnoticed by the learner – gesture is the only kind of TPR or circling that I want to allow myself to do from now on.