• Home
  • Login
  • Registration
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • RSS
ESLarticle.com
Tweet
  • Home
  • Articles
  • Blog
  • Members
  • Add Article

Top Categories

Teaching 505
Other 207
Classroom Management 136
Career Development 135
Learning Methodology 121
Study Skills 88
E-Learning/CALL 87
Teaching Methodology 75
English Language Learning (ELL) 74
Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) 73
English Language Teaching (ELT) 71
Lesson Planning 61
Teach in Shanghai
Home / Articles / Teaching Methodology / View Article

Publishing

  • Articles
  • Add Article
  • Articles Archive
  • Latest Articles
  • Popular Articles

Latest Articles

Mar 10, 2018

Cooperative Learning - Exploring Hidden Possibilities

When it comes to teaching, it may seem challenging to aim for new perspectives related to refining the Learning Process. In this context, phenomena...

Mar 10, 2018

5 Paradigms of Language Teacher Professional Development

Language teaching is a unique field which has seen a tremendous amount of change in recent years. Emerging technologies have fundamentally altered...

Mar 10, 2018

How to Write an Essay for the IELTS Academic Writing Test

The IELTS Academic Writing Test is regarded as the toughest test out of the four sections of the IELTS test. In the Writing Test. There are two...

Mar 5, 2018

The English classes online help develop your confidence levels

Just like any other language, English has its moments of beauty and grace. A small punctuation mark can make a tremendous difference to what you...

Feb 20, 2018

Facts about Volunteering Teaching in India

Facts about Volunteering Teaching in India. Volunteering teaching is one of the noblest acts anyone with proper education can do for others. The...

Popular Articles

1101054 Views

5 Creative Ways to Decorate Your Classroom Bulletin Board This Winter

Back to school, fall leaves, Thanksgiving and Christmas all easily lend themselves to great decorating themes, but what to do when those are over...

342404 Views

Three Unique Ideas To Make Your Bulletin Board More Useful

Bulletin boards have long been existent in campuses. They have proven to be such versatile and useful aids in both the learning and teaching...

116129 Views

History of the Chalkboard

Walk into just about any classroom and you will find one: A dark green board on the wall, lined with pieces of chalk and felt erasers. Chalkboards,...

54935 Views

Report Card Comments

For a small minority, writing report cards isn't a big deal. But most teachers generally dread report card writing time. Completing the comment...

35978 Views

The Most Useful American Business Words

The Most Useful American Business Words: Here's a list that will come in handy for any student enrolled in an English as a Second Language (ESL)...


15 reasons why PPP is so unfashionable

by Alex Case

Jun 25, 2009 Teaching Methodology 5128 Views

_notregistered/art_1715_0ddeda8b20~.jpg

Anyone who has ever taught using the technique of presenting the language, practising it in a controlled way and then giving students the chance to use it in a free communication production activity will know that it is far from a perfect method, and some of the legitimate attacks on its theory and practice are dealt with below. It hardly seems more flawed than Suggestopedia or The Silent Way, though, minor approaches that are still written up with hardly a critical comment in books about the history of English teaching. Nor does PPP seem more logically inconsistent than the Task Based Approach, a vague concept that seems to shift every time you attack it. I have come to the conclusion, then, that there are sometimes other issues involved in those attacks. Here are some of the reasons, both justified and not, why PPP has got more than its fair share of abuse over the years.

1. There is no research funding available to investigate PPP
If a PhD student told their lecturer that they wanted to research PPP they would be laughed off the campus like a historian saying they wanted to do a Marxist analysis. Therefore no one in the academic community has anything to gain from defending it and everything to gain from comparing it unfavourably to the trendy new approach that they are becoming famous for.

2. The attack on PPP is an attack on grammar teaching
Many language teachers and researchers, especially ones of a very left-wing persuasion, are anti anything that involves the teacher teaching and telling their students what is right or wrong, much preferring students to always decide for themselves. Any approach that includes the teaching of grammar will therefore be attacked by such people, often without mentioning that it is the conscious teaching of grammar or classes being teacher led that they object to. Most especially, the Humanistic Language Teaching/ hardcore Communicative types of the 80s never liked PPP and are still a big influence on the industry under other names.

3. It’s been around a long time
Sooner or later something that is fashionable will become unfashionable and people who have been in the industry a long time will need a change just to keep themselves interested in teaching/ publishing/ lecturing etc.

4. It seems to make extravagant claims
Students rarely if ever master the grammar presented in the first part of the lesson well enough to use it in the production activity at the end of the lesson- in fact if they use the target language perfectly by the end of the class it is usually a sign they knew it before you presented it and therefore that you should have presented something different. Although few proponents of the PPP nowadays claim that such an improvement is possible in about an hour of class time, the format of a PPP lesson still seems to suggest that aim and no one has really found another consistent aim for a production stage at the end of the lesson. Fairly straightforward possibilities exist such as moving the production stage to make it more like a TTT or TBA lesson, but the lack of interest in PPP means that any solutions to these problems are unlikely to get much attention.

5. There is money to be made by the publishers from making a big switch to something else
If the publishers can persuade you to throw away all the Headway and Communication Games books they were selling you just a couple of years before because they are based on the apparently totally out of date PPP, you will have little option but to buy a whole new stack of books from them based on whatever the new teaching methodology is.

6. The university Applied Linguistics and TESOL departments gain from making a big switch to something else
Not only do they get to publish lots of books and papers on whatever the next paradigm is supposed to be (and get as much benefit from attacking the new thing as supporting it, as no one is interested in yet another attack on PPP), they might actually get taken seriously by the other university departments if the trendy new theory gets attention outside their field.

7. It never had a philosophical underpinning
Despite the appearance of being a system based on a logical theory of learning, PPP came about at a time when there was a reaction against the false claims of scientific infallibility of the Audio-lingual Approach etc. Things have now inevitably swung back the other way, and people are once again looking to science to tell them how they should and should not learn a language, and the essentially common-sense approach of PPP does not fit in with this desire.

8. It’s too simple
Anyone who has ever tried to learn a language knows that it is an inherently random hit and miss affair where it is impossible to predict what will be easy to remember and what will not in individual cases. Although many methodologies that take this into account have very similar stages to PPP (free communication, looking at language in detail and practising), the fact that they don’t seem to claim that the stages tie together in a neat little sequence makes them harder to attack.

9. It isn’t easy to research
Although I have at times been able to make the Task Based Approach work for my classes, what makes me suspicious of its popularity with TEFL theoreticians is that its main distinction seems to be that it is the perfect format for Applied Linguistics research projects. This is because you can get the students to do the same or a similar task again and compare how much they have improved, whereas in PPP the three stages are different and so you can’t easily get any data out of it. This doesn’t prove anything about the effectiveness of either method of teaching one way or the other.

10. It was always a messy compromise
Although it has been tidied up in various ways over the years to make it attractive to people who want a logical system, PPP is actually the bastard child of grammar teaching ala grammar translation (usually without the translation) and free communication ways of picking the language up. As it appears in most textbooks, it is in fact a version of the eclectic approach that is pretending to be something more systematic. The fact that it doesn’t make sense because of this doesn’t necessarily mean it doesn’t work.

11. An attack on PPP is a hidden attack on textbooks
Many of the people who attack textbooks for using PPP are actually against the whole idea of having a textbook due to other reasons such as the conservative social values that have to be included in them to pass government education boards all over the world.

12. It’s a victim of dissatisfaction with the general state of English teaching theory and practice
If a teacher who has been teaching PPP becomes dissatisfied with how well their students are learning the language it seems just as sensible to blame the teaching methodology as it does to blame student motivation, the school system they went through before reaching the class etc. Sometimes they are right to focus on PPP as the main problem, sometimes it is only part or even a small part of the problem.

For more, please visit

http://edition.tefl.net/articles/teacher-technique/why-ppp-is-unfashionable/

Article source: http://eslarticle.com/pub/teaching-methodology/1715-15-reasons-why-ppp-is-so-unfashionable.html

  • General Information
  • Pictures
Author Info

Author Name: Alex Case

About Author: Alex Case is TEFL.net Reviews Editor and author of the popular blog TEFLtastic.\\r\\nhttp://www.tefl.net/alexcase/

General

Pictures:

Most Recent Articles

  • Dec 8, 2017 Will Integrating Across Content Areas Help English Language Learners? by Alex Case
  • Sep 16, 2017 Educational Approach in Constructivism and Behaviorism by Alex Case
  • Sep 3, 2017 The Counselor's Seat: The Rightful Place of Instructors by Alex Case
  • Mar 26, 2017 Laying the Foundation for a Teamwork Perspective with Students by Alex Case
  • Mar 24, 2017 Linking Bloom's Digital Taxonomy on Media and Instructional Technology by Alex Case

Actions

  • Print Page

Articles Archive

  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017

Random Articles

Classroom Materials

Assessment For Learning and How it May Influence the Future of Learnin

Assessment is one of the most debated topics in education. Opinions differ as to what should be the purpose of such assessments and it is this...

English as a Foreign Language (EFL)

What Makes a Good EFL Teacher?

You're probably asking this question because you are already or soon plan to be an EFL teacher. This means that you probably like working with...

Study Skills

Studying Is Not a Prison Sentence

Why does studying feel like a prison sentence? Common phrases like 'no pain, no gain' give the impression that we ought to be suffering whilst we...

Other

Being Emotionally Intelligent

Our natural state of being, as one with Soul, is a harmonious state of Love, in which the only feelings are of continuous peace and bliss....

Other

The Future of Humanity - Educating Our Children

These recognized divisions in the life cycle are sometimes known as age grades and very often important ceremonies mark the transition from one age...

About ESL Article

ESL Article is a private ESL/TEFL site designed and maintained by educators and educational administrators. It was launched in August 2008 with the aim of bringing ESL/TEFL students, parents, teachers and schools information and articles about the teaching profession and learning community.

Icon Group Member

ESL Article is a member of Icon Group Thailand (IGT), a group of ESL TEFL TESOL websites providing educational resources and information to teachers, schools and students around the world. The group was founded in 2003 and now includes 15+ websites covering educational information services, teaching resources and e-learning.

What is ESL?

English as a second language (ESL) is the use or study of English by speakers of different native languages. It is also known as English for speakers of other languages (ESOL), English as an additional language (EAL), and English as a foreign language (EFL).

  • Home
  • Registration
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Use
  • Help
  • Partner
  • Contact Us
  • About Us
​

© 2018 ESLarticle.com.
Member of Icon Group Thailand - Educating the Future:
TESall All TESOL  Total ESL  ESL Job Feed
TEFL World  TEFL Jobs Overseas  Teach Overseas
Asia TEFL  ESL Powerpoint  Teacher Training