Are your students still struggling to speak confidently—even after months of instruction?
If you’re a teacher searching for a better way to get your students fluent fast using Comprehensible Input, we’d love to introduce you to what we call TPRS 2.0. Blaine Ray (our founder) and Von Ray (our CEO) recently sat down with the Speaking of Language podcast to share how this method is helping students reach Intermediate-Mid fluency in just 60–80 hours—a milestone that often takes years with traditional methods.
🎧 Listen to the full episode here
Our method—Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS)—was born from frustration with ineffective language instruction and developed through decades of classroom experience. It uses storytelling, dramatization, and targeted comprehensible input to help learners acquire language naturally and joyfully.
With TPRS 2.0, we’ve refined our approach even further to focus on production—ensuring students can actually say what they understand. We call this the “manageable chunk” approach: students are given just enough language to chew on without choking (figuratively speaking!).
“If they can’t say it, they don’t know it.” – Blaine Ray
Here at TPRS Books, we’re passionate about empowering educators with practical tools that deliver real results. We offer:
Whether you’re new to TPRS or ready to dive deeper into TPRS 2.0, we have everything you need to teach fluently and joyfully.
"Nothing motivates like success." – Blaine Ray
"This is play. I get to go play and help people become fluent in a language." – Von Ray
“If they can’t say it, they don’t know it.” – Blaine Ray
Explore our trainings, browse our bookstore, or try one of our language classes to see TPRS 2.0 in action.
We’re here to help you teach in a way that’s more effective, more joyful, and—yes—faster.
Want to dig deeper into the full conversation? See the full transcript below.
🎧 Listen to the full episode here
Speaking of Language Podcast -
Kraemer, A., & Lupowitz, S. (Hosts). (2025, March 12). Blaine & Von Ray – The fastest way to fluency (Season 15, Episode 7) [Audio podcast episode]. In Speaking of Language. Cornell Language Resource Center. https://lrc.cornell.edu/podcast
Episode:
[Von Ray]
I get graded every single day as I watch my students talk, and I get to see what is in manageable chunks for them. What was actually a magical moment of language that they were able to produce to my satisfaction? That's all observable every single day. I get that feedback and adjust my teaching based on the feedback that I get from the students’ speech.
[Intro]
You are listening to Speaking of Language, a podcast recorded at the Language Resource Center at Cornell University. Each week, we explore a topic related to language pedagogy and second language acquisition. This week on Speaking of Language,
[Sam Lupowitz]
Blaine and Von Ray discuss TPRS—Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling—and the results they’ve achieved via this method.
[Angelika Kramer]
Welcome to a new episode of Speaking of Language! I'm Angelika Kramer, the Director of the Language Resource Center at Cornell.
[Sam Lupowitz]
And I’m Sam Lupowitz, the LRC's media manager. We are delighted to speak with Blaine and Von Ray today, who will unlock the recipe to rapid language fluency for us. Welcome to Speaking of Language, Blaine and Von!
[Von Ray]
Thank you! We're happy to be here.
[Angelika Kramer]
I am so delighted that both of you found the time to speak with us. Before we hear the secrets of the fastest way to fluency, please tell us about your own background with languages. Blaine, why don’t we start with you?
[Blaine Ray]
Well, I grew up a language failure. I took four years of Spanish, and at age 19, I went on a two-year church mission to Chile. I couldn't produce anything, I couldn't understand anything, And I thought what a waste that was. But I liked language. I kept signing up for Spanish. I remember sitting in Spanish IV and thinking, "I don’t know any of this!" I just studied for the test and that’s how I got through it. I got by with B’s, but I liked Spanish.
So then afterwards, I lived in Chile for two years and I got fluent. I needed something and I tried math. I’m not a math major, and Spanish was my second choice. I majored in Spanish and got a job teaching Spanish in 1975. When I entered the classroom, the only thing I knew about teaching Spanish was what didn’t work—because that’s how I had been taught! They gave me a book, and I struggled. I was miserable. My first school wanted to fire me, my second school did fire me, and my third school said, "If you don’t get more kids in your class, you won’t be teaching here much longer."
Luckily, I found James Asher’s TPR (Total Physical Response) Learning Another Language through Actions. I ordered his book, read it in August, and thought, "This is what I’ve been looking for!" I started using commands to teach, and that was in 1981.
[Angelika Kramer]
And you know what we’ll stop you there because you’re already jumping ahead here. Hold that thought. We’ll come back to that. But Von, what does your background with languages look like?
[Von Ray]
Yeah, so it's a similar story to my dad’s. I took two years of Spanish—two years of failure seemed enough for me—and, ironically, I also went on a mission to Chile. We don’t get to pick where we go, it’s assigned, but I ended up in the same place as my dad. I fell in love with Spanish and the language itself.
I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do career-wise when I returned. At the time, my dad had already developed TPRS. This was in the late ’90s, and I fell in love with teaching. I had some opportunities to start teaching people Spanish. So I was on the phone with my dad asking him, “How do you do this?” because I knew what didn’t work. I loved teaching with stories. To me, language should be fun and there should be laughter. And this is a natural way to make learning a language fun and pleasurable and to get a good result as well. So I fell into my dad’s footsteps.
[Sam Lupowitz]
Absolutely! So Blaine, let’s go back to where you left off. You mentioned TPR and Asher, but you developed TPRS—Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling—in the late 1980s when you were a Spanish teacher. Please, continue sharing with our listeners how did that come about and what is TPRS?
[Blaine Ray]
In 1981, I was teaching at a school where only 30 students were enrolled in their language program—15 in Spanish I, 10 in Spanish II, and six in Spanish III. That’s when the principal said, "You’ve got to get more kids in your class, or you won’t be teaching here." That year, I started teaching with commands. Five years later, we had the highest percentage of language enrollment in the state of Oregon for a school our size—number six overall out of 258 schools!
But by teaching differently, students wanted to take Spanish. The school hired another full-time Spanish teacher, a full-time French teacher, and part-time teachers for Japanese and Russian. The language program exploded and it wasn’t me. It was the method. It was how I taught.
Luckily, in 1984, I found The Natural Approach by Stephen Krashen and Tracy Terrell. That changed my life. When I read the phrase, "Language is acquired through comprehensible input," I thought that’s what I am missing. I thought it meant you just talk and give input. But that wasn’t it. The input part was easy. It was the comprehensible… so I went in with a lot of uncomprehensible input. Things i tried didn’t work. Tracy Terrell’s book didn’t work for me. These things didn’t work for me until one day I dramatized a story and the kids acted out the story and I questioned them. The theater made the language come alive. And the questioning let me see whether comprehension was taking place. Those two elements of TPRS started from the very first story and they continue today.
[Angelika Kramer]
That’s amazing. So you made magic happen actually, right? I like it. I like it.
[Blaine Ray]
By accident. [laughs]
[Angelika Kramer]
Sometimes that’s how the best magic happens. That’s good.
Von, can you tell us a little bit more about how you ended up in your dad’s footsteps and what you do?
[Von Ray]
Yeah, I graduated from college and I got a job. The school I worked at was in the Bay Area in California. They were looking for a TPRS teacher. Again, at this time, TPRS was pretty well-known. My dad had been presenting for decades at this point. So some schools just wanted TPRS teachers. That was my entry point, was teaching with TPRS. Any TPRS teacher has to go on a journey of learning how to do it like my dad was saying. How do you make the language comprehensible? Right? And there’s so much observation. You teach a sentence or a part of a story. You see if it sticks, right? Does it actually stick? Can they actually use it in their speech? And you know. That’s a process of trial and error. There’s some observation you learn. Certain words are harder and easier. And from the student perspective as well as I’ve learned languages. Some phrases and words and languages are a lot harder and take more repetition. So yeah. I taught 6 years in the classroom, and then I joined my dad’s company, TPRS Books. And I’ve been with it ever since. A few years ago, we switched roles. He sold me the company, and we kept going, and I love this work. I love impacting teachers’ lives and students’ lives with language.
[Angelika Kramer]
And it’s important work. So thanks for that.
[Blaine Ray]
And my biggest fear is they will fire me. But so far he hasn’t. So I just keep hoping every day or he can boot me any day.
[Angelika Kramer]
[laughs]
[Sam Lupowitz]
A shameless power grab.
[Angelika Kramer]
You need more magic.
[Sam Lupowitz]
So over the last 15 years or so, there’s been a lot of research about the effectiveness of TPRS. Karen Lichtman, who was on our podcast back in 2021 reviewed existing TPRS research, and I’m quoting now, “The majority of the research has found that TPRS students outperform traditional students on some measures of language skills.” All 30 comparative studies that she looked at supported the use of TPRS. 21 of the 30 studies showed advantages of TPRS over other teaching methods. So, how is TPRS different and why does it work.
[Blaine Ray]
One thing is if we, and Von can talk about this in a moment. If we are talking about fluency, there is nothing better. We are doing things that nobody would have ever imagined possible. We’ve perfected this and this 2.0 Angelika talked about is miraculous. For us an even today, we started in September an English and a Spanish class. And to see their progress in 30-40 hours of class is shocking. And we’ve just discovered some things. Go ahead, Von. Do you have any comments?
[Von Ray]
Yeah. And that really is our filter and our perspective and our expertise. How do you get students fluent? Which is ACTFL study and what our students have taken is the STAMP test, which is one of the proficiency tests. The data shows it takes 4-7 years for beginning students to reach intermediate low or intermediate mid. So it’s a multi-year process. 85% of our students of our beginning students are reaching these same levels of fluency in 60-80 hours. So it’s just really faster and how they do it. We feel like we’ve perfected the science. We use the term “manageable chunk”. A chunk is an amount of language we give our students. And we want to know if our students can produce it. I love the metaphor of an apple. We as language teachers, the apple represents the amount of language we give our students in a given day. So we hand our students this apple, and we say, “Take a bite out of the apple.” So there is some language we’re teaching them. So a manageable chunk follow the metaphor of an apple because if I take a bite of an apple, I don’t know how big of a bite you guys take, but I take a bite and if I don’t choke on it, then that’s a manageable chunk of apple. But if I take too big of a bite of an apple, I am going to choke on the apple. In the same token, if we give our students too much language, they can’t produce it. And that’s the biggest challenge is limiting the amount of language so that they can actually produce it. We feel we’ve perfected it. At least in theory that science of the manageable chunk is what we are after. So we give them enough language that we then observe what they can produce. If they can’t produce it, we reduce the amount of language that we are teaching. And in a process of 60-80 hours of doing this, giving them limited doses of language, gradually getting a little harder, they are reaching this intermediate level.
[Blaine Ray]
I heard the quote, “If they can’t say it, they don’t know it.” And that’s TPRS 2.0. It’s based 100% on that concept. They have to be able to produce this chunk, which is basically a paragraph of language in the context of I/you/he/she. So, they are dramatizing a story and they’re producing this chunk talking about I, you, and he. And they’r doing the verb changes in saying that chunk. But if our slowest processing student in the class can’t produce this chunk, we’re doing something wrong.
[Angelika Kramer]
So, can you walk through our listeners what actually happens in a TPRS classroom. So the reading and the storytelling. Do the students do the reading? Do the teachers do the reading? Who’s doing the storytelling? What is the connection between the comprehensible input and the fluency that students attain?
[Blaine Ray]
The reading is kind of a byproduct. We read the story at the beginning of our class kind of more as a refresher to remind us of the facts of the story and what’s going on. But what’s really happening is we start with a sentence with the idea of working up to a paragraph. So a sentence would be maybe we might add the sentence, “There is a boy. The boy is George.” Then we have everyone in our class be George. So every student, I would call Angelika George and by your name Georg, I would remind you that you are not Angelika in this story. you’re George. “There is a boy. The boy is George. You are George.”
[Angelika Kramer]
I am George.
[Blaine Ray]
And then, I add myself and so we always take on the character of Petey the Pizza. And so in this story, “I am not a boy. I am a pizza. I am Petey. I am a pizza. You’re a boy.” You see now, we’re at a chunk. So we start with first of all, what we call circling where they just process and they don’t produce. They only produce with yes, or no. Or “Oh”. There is no production. That’s just for processing. Once they are processing that sentence, then we go to individuals, and we see can you answer a sentence. So I say, “Angelika George, are you a boy?”
[Angelika Kramer]
Yes, I am a boy.
[Blaine Ray]
And then I verify it. Yes, you are a boy. And then I might add something. You’re a boy and I am a pizza. You’re George and I’m Petey. And then I might say to you Angelika George, who is George.
[Angelika Kramer]
I am George.
[Blaine Ray]
Yes, you are George. Then I’ll say, Angelika George. Who is Petey?
[Angelika Kramer]
You are Petey. You are Petey the pizza.
[Blaine Ray]
Yes. I am Petey the Pizza. You’re George and you’re a boy. And so you see then we’re at the paragraph level. This is what Von was talking about when he was talking about the chunk. So we’re always talking in your own words. There’s nothing rote, nothing memorized. You’re just telling this chunk in your own words. And so everybody in class… we want everybody to give their interpretation. In other words, their time on the stage. And so then, we’d say: “There’s a boy. He’s George. He’s not a pizza. He’s a boy. I am a pizza. I am Petey.” Then I would say, “Angelika George, describe the situation.”
[Angelika Kramer]
You are Petey. You are a Pizza. I want pizza.
[Blaine Ray]
You don’t know want. Then I’ll verify that back to you. And I’ll say: “Yes. You’re a boy. You’re George. I’m not a boy. I’m not George. I’m Petey. I’m Petey the pizza. And you are George. You are a boy.” Every time this is said, it’s said differently. And then I say it back and you say it back. And kids hear this over and over. And that’s what it takes to get language strong enough to produce it.
[Angelika Kramer]
Right.
[Von Ray]
I’ll share some nuance. So a lot of the things we do, and Blaine says, “Oh. You’re all a character in the story. We call on our students.” We literally do that in the story. “You’re Angelika George.” So the reason we do that is from past failure with TPRS 1.0. Our students weren’t fluent. First of all, they weren’t very fluent at all. TPRS 1.0, the tagline would be CI with stories. Our focus was not on production. It was… Talk about this manageable chunk. So I would give my students, instead of saying, “Take a bite of the apple and choke on it,” I would give them a watermelon. Here’s a watermelon! There’s so much language.
[Angelika Kramer]
Yeah.
[Von Ray]
Since our focus was not on on fluency, it was on comprehension, we just bombarded them with all of this language. Because we didn’t have an understanding of how to get students fluent.
[Blaine Ray]
Our best students were fluent. But they were fluent in 3rd person because that’s how we developed stories. But what TPRS 2.0 did, was develop fluency on a much smaller chunk. So now, before in a year we’d go through a story in a week. 30-40 stories in a year. Now, we do a story in 30 hours, so we’re doing much much slower, ten times slower but we’re getting fluency in this smaller amount of language in I/you/he/she. It’s a tremendous difference.
[Angelika Kramer]
Yeah
[Sam Lupowitz]
So, you already mentioned that TPRS is fun and engaging for students. What are some other benefits of this method?
[Von Ray]
To learn in a pleasurable environment and get result. I think of classes I’ve been to when my energy goes up. To me that is a very positive experience. When I leave a class and my energy level is higher, that’s TPRS classes for me. I’ve been teaching this week. I taught yesterday. Oh my goodness, when our… I mean the energy level was higher. Because good storytelling there’s drama, there’s humor, there’s uneqpected twists and turns. There’s co-creation. Our students contribute a lot of the details. This is play. I get to go play and help people become fluent in a language. I’m solving a real problem for them, right. And to become intermediate fluent is a great accomplishment. So I would just say, that energy level. There’s fun and enjoyment. What a great thing we’re doing.
[Blaine Ray]
Nothing motivates like succes. And I teach an intermediate and an advanced class. It doesn’t matter their level. This feeling of what they can do with this chunk and challenging them with characters. And we’ll say for example, “Now, Angelika George, you’re Petey and I’m George.” And then their brain has to do all the switches.
[Angelika Kramer]
Yeah, my mind’s blown. I’m Petey.
[Blaine Ray]
You are a pizza.
[Angelika Kramer]
I am pizza!
[Blaine Ray]
I’m George. You’re the pizza. And so, we change the roles and this…. in Spanish the object and the indirect object pronouns go before the verb. That’s a learning process of feel.
We’ve been teaching virtual classes for years now. So our sample size is big enough and our very best students reached intermediate high in the same class. Maybe 10-15 percent. And again ACTFL says that’s 9 years, but that’s 9 years of the best students in ACTFL, because who takes Spanish 9? Only your very top students. I mean, it’s not even 1 out of 20 that would make it to Spanish 9. And they’re saying they are getting to intermediate high. Von was at a workshop last week and when he says these numbers on the STAMP test. The one teacher,...
[Von Ray]
Yeah. I was presenting at the Southwest COLT conference on our book the Fastest Way to Fluency. And I just said, “How many of you would like those results? 85% getting intermediate in 60-80 hours?” Every hand goes up. And then I ask, “Are any of you getting results right now? Are any students getting intermediate in a school year?” So I asked her, ‘What percentage are getting intermediate in a school year?” and she said that five percent did. And that’s what we got with TPRS 1.0. A very low percentage. And yeah. We’re there to help her with ideas to increase that dramatically. 85% is a solid number.
[Angelika Kramer]
Absolutely. So I can totally see the allure and the effectiveness in k-12 education for younger learners. How does the TPRS 2.0 recipe translate into adult language learning. Is it the same approach that you would follow?
[Blaine Ray]
It’s funny that that’s about all we’ve done. All of our experimentation and everything has been with adult learners. It’s interesting that we start for the very first time, we reversed this and in September we started an English class. They couldn’t produce a sentence of English on day one. And so we didn’t know how this would go. We guarantee intermediate fluency in our Spanish classes, but there is no way we’d do this in English because we hadn’t tried it. Much to our surprised, they’re better at English than the Spanish, and it’s just because this way of teaching, the verbs are easy. And it’s just a much much easier process to learn fluency in learning English than it is in learning Spanish because of verb conjugations which slow the process down many times. Whereas in English verbs, few of them have conjugations.
[Von Ray]
It’s also interesting throughout the process, day one is the smallest chunk. What Blaine was sharing with you, Angelika: There is a boy. The boy is George. I am Petey. It’s not a lot of information. But as the hours progress, the stories get quite a bit longer. So our students in that first 10-20 hours, we see there’s more challenge there. And that’s also demonstrated in shorter when they Describe the Situation, they’re talking, and they speak for a shorter amount of time. Whereas now, these classes are in the 30 hour mark and almost everybody can speak for several minutes. For multiple minutes.
[Blaine Ray]
We often have to limit. We have pretty big classes, and we want everyone to have a change. At first I give them the time they want. Then at the end, everyone has 2 minutes max. And I just have to cut them off so that everyone can talk.
[Sam Lupowitz]
Von, you are the current owner of TPRS Books. So, in addition to the recent TPRS 2.0: The Fastest Way to Fluency book, tell us about the other resources you provide.
[Von Ray]
Yeah. Wonderful. Our company really does 3 things. We train teachers how to teach so we give regular TPRS trainings. Virtual and in-person trainings to school districts. We have a variety of those. We also mentioned our language classes. And we also publish a whole bunch of books. We’ve published over 100 small readers. There’s several. Various languages. We’re known for the readers we produce and pedagogical books as well like curriculum. So those are the things we do to serve people. Books, training and language classes.
[Angelika Kramer]
Fantastic. And you mentioned that you attend conferences of course. But where can listeners learn more about TPRS?
[Von Ray]
Perfect, our website TPRSbooks.com. Everything is there. Resources, language classes.
[Angelika Kramer]
Wonderful.
[Blaine Ray]
We have live trainings, online trainings. They can go find out. You know the real best way is to take the class.
[Von Ray]
The beauty of the describe the situation as Blaine was saying. You go back to the apple. I get graded every single day as I watch my students talk and I get to see was it a manageable chunk for them. Was it actually a manageable amount of language that they were able to produce with confidence, accuracy and no hesitation. That’s all observable. So every single day, I get that feedback and I adjust my teaching based on the feedback I get from students’ speech.
[Angelika Kramer]
Well, gentlemen. This was wonderful. I am George and I am a pizza.
[Blaine Ray]
No! I am the Pizza.
[Angelika Kramer]
Oh. I will fight you on that, Blaine.
[laughter[
[Angelika Kramer]
Maybe we can both be pizza.
[Blaine Ray]
Ok, I’ll let you be a pizza for a little bit.
[Angelika Kramer]
Thank you. That’s very gracious of you. [laughter]
[Blaine Ray]
This is Angelika at her best. Her charm.
[laughter]
[Angelika Kramer]
Before we sign off though, we’d like to ask each of you for a word in a language that you love, that you are learning, or that you want to learn that makes you feel good. What is that word for each of you?
[Von Ray]
Mine is such a simple phrase. It’s “Es Obvio,” which means, “it’s obvious”. The feling behind this phrase, having taught with stories for years in the TPRS world, we use this phrase, “es obivo.” We’ll say something ironic or ridiculous and we act like its obvious or normal. So tehre is humor and positive emotion in this simple phrase. Es obvio. It’s obvious.
[Angelika Kramer]
I like it. Awesome. Blaine, what about you?
[Blaine Ray]
The word I thought of was I love this word in Spanish. It’s cariño. And it’s, we don’t have the word in English. It’s non-romantic love. I love my students. I love teaching. I love my students. That was always expressed, cariño. I have a good friend, a teacher who said, “You can’t teach cariño.”
[Sam Lupowitz]
Beautiful. Well, this has been great. Thank you so much for speaking of language with us, Blaine and Von.
[Blaine Ray]
Thank you for having us. [Von Ray]
Thank you so much.
