“PPP” Presentation,
Practice and Production
INTRODUCTION:
In recent years, the purely "structural"
approach to language teaching has been criticized, as it tends to produce
students who, despite having the ability to produce structurally accurate
language, are generally deficient in their ability to use the language and
understand its use in real communication.
What is the "structural" approach to
language teaching? If your classroom is full of students that memorize
vocabulary and grammar rules through repetition and rote learning, and are
corrected for even the smallest mistake whilst speaking or writing English,
then you are a champion of the structural teaching approach. No doubt
your students are learning a lot of English, but how effective and how
enjoyable is this process?
An approach to language teaching has been developed
which attempts to overcome the weaknesses of the "structural
approach" (which incidentally is the kind of teaching methodology that
tends to prevail in Asian public schools). The new approach is based on
viewing language as a combination of:
a) Linguistic
Structures
b) Situational
Settings
c) Communicative
Acts
This is known as the "communicative
approach" to language teaching. Communication is not simply a matter
of what is said (structure/lexis), but where it is said, by whom, when and why
it is said. In short, this is basically the "communicative
function" or "purpose" of language.
At the opposite extreme from the structural
approach, and with at least as many flaws, is the purely
"conversational" approach, where it is assumed that exposure to lots
of conversation from a native English speaker will produce a high level of
aptitude in the students. Whereas the structural approach promotes
accuracy and tends to inhibit communicative confidence, the conversational
approach tends to create communicative confidence in combination with many
entrenched errors. Being keen to communicate and yet not being able to do
so properly is almost as risky as knowing what to say but not having the
confidence or practice to use it...
The PPP Approach to Language Teaching
The "Three Ps" approach to Language Teaching is the most
common modern methodology employed by professional schools around the world.
It is a strong feature of the renowned CELTA certification and other
TEFL qualifications offered especially in the United Kingdom.
While this approach is generally geared toward
adult learners, most of the principles involved are also essential to lessons
for children (click on the "Young Learners" link above for more
information). It is very important to understand what "Presentation", "Practice" and
"Production" really are, and how they work in combination
to create effective communicative language learning.
Presentation is the beginning or introduction to
learning language, and Production is the culmination of the learning process,
where a learner has become a "user" of the language as opposed to a
"student" of the language. Practice is the process that
facilitates progress from the initial stage through to the final one.
To explain the process in brief, the beginning of a
lesson involves the introduction of the new language in a conceptual way in
combination with some kind of real (or at least "realistic feeling")
situation. When this is understood, the students are provided with a
linguistic "model" to apply to the concept they have recognized.
With this "model" in mind, the students practice the new language by
means of various "controlled" activities. After sufficient
practice, the students move into some kind of "productive" activity,
where a situation calls for the language to be used naturally without correction
or control.
In general, for communicative language learning to
be most effective, the three stages need to occur and they must flow easily
from one stage to the next.
PRESENTATION
This is the first (and perhaps most crucial) stage
to the language learning process, as it usually has a profound influence on the
stages that follow and governs whether those stages are effective or not.
Presentation involves the building of a situation
requiring natural and logical use of the new language. When the "situation"
is recognized and understood by the students, they will then start
instinctively building a conceptual understanding of the meaning behind the new
language, and why it will be relevant and useful to them. When the
situation surrounding the new language and the conceptual meaning of it has
been achieved, the new language should be introduced by means of a linguistic
"model". It is this model that the students will go on to
practice and hopefully achieve naturally without help during a productive
activity.
For obvious reasons, it is naturally easier to
"present" new language to ESL students (who are learning English as a
Second Language in an English speaking environment) than it is to EFL (English
as a Foreign Language) students, who hear little or no English outside of the
classroom. EFL teachers in particular need to work hard to build
"realistic" feeling situations requiring the new language. If
the "situation" appears totally unreal or even farcical to the students,
so too will the language they are learning.
An important aspect of introducing the situation
requiring and concept underlying new language is to build them up using
whatever English the students have already learned or have some access
to. At lower levels, pictures and body language are typical ways of
presenting new language. As students progress, dialogues and text can
also be used.
There are a variety of ways in which new language
items may be presented but most Presentations should have at least some of the
following features: meaningful, memorable and realistic examples; logical
connection; context; clear models; sufficient meaningful repetition;
"staging" and "fixing"; briefness and recycling.
PRACTICE:
The Practice stage is the best known to teachers
irrespective of their training or teaching objectives. However, it is a
stage that is often "over-done" or used ineffectively, either because
Presentation was poor (or lacking altogether) or it is not seen and used as a
natural step toward Production. It is the important middle stage to
communicative language teaching, but exactly that - the "middle"
stage.
Practice activities need to be clear and
understandable - they should also be directed toward promoting a considerable
degree of confidence in the students. In general, a carefully laid out
practice activity that looks "attractive" to the eye will generate
the students' motivation. They need to be challenged, but they should
also feel that the activity is "within their reach".
Making a smooth transition from Presentation to
Practice usually involves moving the students from the Individual Drill stage
into Pair Work (chain pair-work, closed pair-work and open pair-work).
Communicative practice then leads the way toward Production.
PRODUCTION:
The Production Stage is the most important stage of
communicative language teaching. Successful Production is a clear
indication that the language learners have made the transition from
"students" of the key language to "users" of the language.
Generally Production involves creating a situation
requiring the language that was introduced in the Presentation Stage.
That situation should result in the students "producing" more
personalized language. Production is highly dependent on the Practice
Stage, because if students do not have confidence in the language then they
will naturally be hesitant to independently "use" it.
One of the most important things to remember is
that Production activities should not "tell" students what to
say. Whereas in Practice the students had most or all of the information
required, during Production they don't have the information and must
think. Ideally it is challenging in that it is representative of
"real life" situations.
Creating and engaging in "Productive"
classroom activities can require a certain level of cognitive ability.
Production activities for Young Learners in particular need to be carefully
thought out and prepared.
Some good examples of effective Production activities include
situational role-plays, debates, discussions, problem-solving, narratives,
descriptions, quizzes and games.
“Presentation”
involves presenting the target language (the language to be taught to the
students) to the students generally through eliciting and cueing of the
students to see if they know it and then providing the language if no one does.
The target language
is usually put on the board either in structure (grammar-type) charts or in
dialogs. Presentation features more “teacher talk” than the other stages
of the lesson, generally as much as 65-90% of the time. This portion of
the total lesson can take as much as 20-40% of the lesson time.
Next comes “Practice”
where the students practice the target language in one to three activities that
progress from very structured (students are given activities that provide
little possibility for error) to less-structured (as they master the material).
These activities
should include as much “student talk” as possible and not focus on written
activities, though written activities can provide a structure for the verbal
practices. Practice should have the “student talk time” range from 60-80
percent of the time with teacher talk time being the balance of that
time. This portion of the total lesson can take from 30-50% of the lesson
time.
“Production” is the
stage of the lesson where the students take the target language and use it in
conversations that they structure (ideally) and use it to talk about themselves
or their daily lives or situations. Practice should involve student talk
at as much as 90% of the time and this component of the lesson can/should take
as much as 20-30% of the lesson time.
As you can see the
general structure of a PPP lesson is flexible but an important feature is the
movement from controlled and structured speech to less-controlled and more
freely used and created speech. Another important feature of PPP (and
other methods too) is the rapid reduction of teacher talk time and the increase
in student talk time as you move through the lesson.
One of the most
common errors untrained teachers make is that they talk too much. EFL
students get very little chance to actually use the language they learn and the
EFL classroom must be structured to create that opportunity. See the
paragraph on Pairwork and Small Groups below.
“ESA” Engage, Study
and Activate
Roughly equivalent to
PPP, ESA is slightly different in that it is designed
to allow movement back and forth between the stages. However,
each stage is similar to the PPP stages in the same order. Proponents of
this method stress its flexibility compared to PPP and the method, as defined
by Jeremy Harmer (its major advocate), uses more elicitation and stresses the
“Engagement” of students in the early stages of the lesson.
ESA is superior
method to PPP when both are looked at from a rigid point of view. But,
EFL is not rigid and you should not adhere to any one viewpoint or
method. PPP is often an easier method for teacher-trainees to get a
handle on but probably more programs teach ESA than PPP these days, especially
those that teach only one of the approaches.
How
do we structure our teaching?
(a)
Presentation, Practice, Production
Most
teachers plan three phases in their lessons according to the PPP model of
Presentation, Practice and Production.
During
Presentation, new language is presented perhaps as a grammatical pattern
or more frequently within some familiar situation. During this presentation
phase, the teacher is often very active and dominates the class doing more than
90% of the talking.
During
Practice, the new language item is identified, repeated and manipulated
by the students. Unless the teacher is using pairwork or a language laboratory,
the teacher also dominates this phase of the lesson occupying more than 50% of
the talking in class.
During
Production, the students attempt to use the new language in different
contexts provided by the teacher.
(b)
Engage, study, activate
Since
the PPP model has functioned more or less effectively for generations, you
might ask why we should be looking at different models. PPP works well provided
that your syllabus is based only on giving students 'thin slices' of language
one slice at a time. The PPP model does not work nearly so well when teaching
more complex language patterns beyond the sentence level or communicative
language skills.
Another
basic problem with PPP is that it is usually based on segments of the one-hour
lesson. In this way, lessons are designed with a single focus.
In
How to Teach English [Longman 1998] Jeremy Harmer proposed a different
three stage model, the ESA model: Engage, Study, Activate.
The three stages of engage, study, activate
(a)
Engage
During
the Engage phase, the teacher tries to arouse the students' interest and
engage their emotions. This might be through a game, the use of a picture,
audio recording or video sequence, a dramatic story, an amusing anecdote, etc.
The aim is to arouse the students' interest, curiosity and attention. The PPP
model seems to suggest that students come to lessons ready motivated to listen
and engage with the teacher's presentation.
(b)
Study
The
Study phase activities are those which focus on language (or
information) and how it is constructed. The focus of study could vary from the
pronunciation of one particular sound to the techniques an author uses to
create excitement in a longer reading text; from an examination of a verb tense
to the study of a transcript of an informal conversation to study spoken style.
There
are many different styles of study, from group examination of a text to
discover topic-related vocabulary to the teacher giving an explanation of a
grammatical pattern.
Harmer
says, 'Successful language learning in a classroom depends on a judicious blend
of subconscious language acquisition (through listening and reading, for
example) and the kind of Study activities we have looked at here.
(c)
Activate
This
element describes the exercises and activities which are designed to get
students to use the language as communicatively as they can. During Activate,
students do not focus on language construction or practise particular language
patterns, but use their full language knowledge in the selected situation or task.
Lesson Structure
(a)
The ESA lesson
A
complete lesson may be planned on the ESA model where the 50-60 minutes are
divided into three different segments. It is very unlikely that these segments
will be equal in duration. Activate will probably be the longest phase
but Study will probably be longer than Engage.
In
this format ESA would appear to be little different from PPP.
(b)
The ESA, ESA, ESA lesson
Teachers
of children and younger teenagers know that their students cannot concentrate
for long periods. They can still use the ESA model but the model may be used
repeatedly, producing a larger number of shorter phases.
This
repeated ESA model also works well with older teenagers and adults and gives
lessons a richness and variety which students appreciate.
It
would be wrong to give the impression that Engage, Study and Activate
are each single activities. They are phases of the teaching/learning process
which may contain one or more activities.
