15 reasons why PPP is so
unfashionable
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.
13. An attack on PPP is an attack on the CELTA
People who think the 4-week CELTA is an inadequate training scheme for beginner
teachers or have a commercial interest in reducing its reputation often focus on
the fact that teachers are taught to use the untrendy PPP method of teaching.
When that is the case it could be a valid question, but often people’s issues
come from other aspects of the course and they are just using PPP as an easy
target.
14. They are attacking a PPP that doesn’t exist
As PPP has never been particularly based on theory and there is no one standard
text on how to use it, people tend to attack PPP by the one thing everyone
agrees on- what the three letters of PPP stand for. Few teachers and few
textbooks nowadays interpret the method as an endless succession of those three
stages, however, with revision activities, progress tests, skills work,
functional and situational language, free discussion lessons, needs analysis and
diagnostic tests being totally standard things that fit around the PPP format
but are not included in the most basic descriptions of what it is.
15. There is nothing to excite you about PPP
PPP is the Ford Escort/ Toyota Corolla of teaching methods- however long you use
it and however well it works for you, you just can’t get excited or sentimental
about it.
http://edition.tefl.net/articles/teacher-technique/why-ppp-is-unfashionable/
About The Author
Alex Case
Alex Case is TEFL.net Reviews Editor and author of the popular blog TEFLtastic.\\r\\nhttp://www.tefl.net/alexcase/