Total Physical Response (TPR) is a language teaching method developed by James Asher, a professor emeritus of psychology at San José State University. It is based on the coordination of language and physical movement. In TPR, teachers give commands to children in the target language, and children respond with whole-body actions.

At PRINCETON SCHOOL, we use the TPR method as one of our major comprehension approaches to language teaching. The listening and responding (with actions) serves two purposes: it is a means of quickly recognizing meaning in the language being learned, and a means of passively learning the structure of the language itself. We believe TPR is a valuable way to learn vocabulary, especially idiomatic terms, e.g. phrasal verbs.