It emphasizes commands, leaving out the forms used in narratives, descriptions, or conversations, and it is predominantly teacher-initiated and directed, with little opportunity for student creativity and little attention to individual interests. More importantly, TPR promotes only the learners' receptive language skills and ignores the productive ones, which are essential to real communication. After a few weeks, some students spontaneously begin to give commands to each other. This indicates readiness for a gradual evolution from the receptive to the productive mode. The storytelling strategies of TPR-S utilize the vocabulary taught in the earlier stage by incorporating it into stories that the learners hear, watch, act out, retell, revise, read, write, and rewrite.
Subsequent stories introduce additional vocabulary in meaningful contexts.
The children are already familiar with stories from other school and preschool experiences, and now they are exposed to this familiar genre as the teacher presents it in a new language with an abundance of gestures, pictures, and other props to facilitate comprehension. After hearing a story, various students act it out together or assume different roles while their peers watch. The teacher may retell the story with slight variations, replacing one character with another, and engaging different students in the acting. The ultimate goal is to have students develop original stories and share them with others. A whole range of activities may be included, such as videotaping, drama, creating booklets for children in the lower grades, designing bulletin boards, and so forth.