Well do we like PPP or not?

[fluffyhamster]

Glad to hear you found something in the trail of links, Fran!

[Heath]

PPP (Presentation, Practice, and Production)
Traditionally this meant the teacher chooses an item of language, usually a grammatical structure and does the following: give a presentation on the meaning, grammatical rules and pronunciation of that structure; provide controlled practice in the form of gap-fills, substitution, and drilling; provide students with a task or activity to practise using the language in a more natural, productive way.

More modern approaches to PPP follow the same vague lesson structure, but are more communicative and contextualised. Two 'CELTA' type lessons that follow this structure are Situational Presentations (or Aural/Visual Presentations) and Text-Based Presentations.

Situational Presentation
Lead in - establish a situation (communicative context) in which the grammar is likely to be used.
Clarification - help the Ss understand the meaning/use, structure & pronunciation.
Controlled practice - drilling, substitution & student-centred speaking tasks.
Freer practice - role-play, discussion tasks, etc.

Text-Based Presentation
Lead in - get Ss thinking about the topic & pre-teach key vocab.
Reading - a task to focus on meaning so the text forms a communicative context in which the grammar is used.
Clarification - as above
Controlled practice - as above
Freer practice - as above

In both these lesson approaches, clarification = presentation, controlled practice = practice, and freer practice = production. The addition to more traditional PPP being that a clear and communicative context is established (either through a visual/aural situation or through a text), the presentation step is often through student-centred discovery tasks, and the practice steps are more student-centred and productive.


So what's wrong with PPP?

• 1. It puts the control of learning in the teachers hands, not the students (ie. the teacher chooses what the students learn, usually regardless of what they need, what they want, or what they are ready for).
  2. It assumes that students learn what teachers teach. Unfortunately, research and practice shows that this is just not true. Students seem to learn the language they are ready for regardless of what the teacher teaches.
  3. It limits lessons to one grammatical structure. Out of the billions of words, phrases, expressions, functions and structures in English - you spend 50min teaching just one!

Time could be better spent:

• 1. Working out what language students need, want and are ready for.
  2. Exposing them to a variety of language so the can (consciously or subconsciously) pick out what language they are ready for.
  3. Exposing them to a large variety of words, phrases, expressions, functions and structures instead of focusing on just one at a time.

[Heath]

Here are some alternatives.
Note that each of these are either always or often introduced on CELTA courses (which is not nearly as 'rigid' as some people assume - it's actually about as comprehensive and academically & professally relevant as you could possibly get in just 4 weeks).

Reading/Listening Lessons
Lead in to get Ss engaged and thinking about the topic.
Pre-teach vocab if it might block their ability to complete the reading/listening tasks.
Gist reading/listening to practise the 'skimming' style skill used to get a light, globabl understanding of a text before going into more detail.
Detailed reading/listening to practise other reading/listening skills such as picking out specific information, getting a deeper understanding, making inferences, etc.
Productive follow-up tasks to practise writing/speaking skills and personalise the lesson.

* No real focus on grammar, functions or vocabulary. Main aim is to develop reading/listening skills. But Ss do learn a lot, both subconsciously and consciously, about language just by reading/listening.

Test-Teach-Test
Lead in to get Ss engaged and thinking about the topic (assuming there is a clear one)
Test - a student-centred task (that could be either communicative or more meaning & form focused), during which the teacher monitors the Ss to see how much they can already do in relation to the chosen area, and decides what they need help with.
Teach - the teacher only teachers those areas that the Ss clearly needed help with
Test - a student-centred task that is communicative and contextualised, so that, both, students have a chance to practise using the language and the teacher can assess how useful the 'Teach' step was.

* Restrictive in a similar way to PPP in that the teacher usually chooses a particular structure to focus on. The difference is that the teacher can choose two or three structures that are similar in some ways, then see which of those the Ss can use effectively and which they can't, thus tailoring the lesson more to the Ss' needs.

Dialogue Build
Set the scene - one in which a particular set of phrases/expressions are used (eg. a customer and waiter in a restaurant, a business phone call where someone leaves a message, a sick patient visiting a doctor, etc).
Use the scene to elicit a first line (eg. doctor: "What seems to be the problem")
Repeat for the second line (eg. patient: "I have a stomachache")
Do lots of drilling around the room, chorally, individually, and with pairs taking the two different roles.
Repeat for lines three and four (eg. "Are you experiencing any other symptoms?" "Yes, I have a rash")
Repeat for lines five and six (eg. "Hmm, I think you have...", "Oh, is that all.")
More drilling with open and closed pairs doing the whole dialogue.
Elicit the whole dialogue to the board highlighting which parts of the phrases/expressions are fixed and which parts are flexible.
Role-plays and/or scenarios involving the same type of scene for freer practice.

* Language is more practical and immediately useful to Ss than grammatical structures and can easily combine lexis and functional language. Only really appropriate for short dialogues, and becomes less useful at higher levels.

Task-Based Learning
Lead in and get Ss thinking about the topic.
The teacher might introduce some lexis or functional language the Ss may need.
Ss do a communicative task with a particular aim (the aim should be a real-world aim not a language aim, such as "buy all the food on your list spending as little money as possible", or "find out how many people in the room have computers, how much time they spend using them, and what they use them for", or "there was a burglary, interview the 5 suspects and decide who did it").
The teacher listens and takes notes on grammar, vocabulary, and expressions that the Ss use well, use poorly, or needed to use but didn't.
The teacher decides which language to clarify and help Ss with based on how they did the task.
The Ss do some controlled practice tasks or exercises to check that they understand and to re-inforce the learning.

Another option, either before or after the task, is to have the Ss listen to some native speakers completing the same task and commenting on the language they used to do so.

* Very tailored to the Ss; communicative; real-world context; a variety of language is introduced including grammatical structures, lexis, functions, etc, depending on what Ss seem to need; language is immediately useful to Ss. More difficult for the teacher though, who needs to have a lot of language awareness and needs to monitor and pay very close attention to the Ss language use.



These are very rough descriptions, and I'd recommend reading up for more accurate and thorough details on each of these approaches. But experiment a bit, and see what combination of these is best for you and your Ss.

[fluffyhamster]

Discussion continued (sort of ) here:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewt ... 1191#41191