Archive for the ‘TTT (Test teach test)’ Category

Carrying on looking at whether teachers should still teach PPP and therefore whether teacher training courses like the CELTA should still cover it, lets look at some criticisms people could level and/ or have levelled at this approach:

There is little or no experimental evidence to suggest that PPP works

Having not read all the literature since PPP was first conceived I have no idea if this is true or not, but there certainly aren’t a lot of papers around at the moment sticking up for it, that is for sure. A lack of papers on the topic could mean that everyone thinks it is already proved worthless, but anyone who thinks pure scientific results always decide where the funding and interest of researchers go is rather naive and hasn’t read the story of (amongst others) how Stalin’s “scientific” theories set up a mini industry in researchers backing him up. Here are some other possible reasons why there are no professors of Applied Linguistics staking their career on sticking up for a theory well past its heyday:

• It’s unfashionable
• They know the academic rage that will fall down upon them for going against the academic flow
• There’s no funding for it
• No one would publish it
• A PhD student who wanted to tackle it would never be allowed to by their prof

Grammar instruction of any kind is not needed as students can best pick up the language just by using it, listening to it and reading it, so PPP is useless

According to the book I am 3/4 of the way through (Studies in Honour of Rod Ellis- OUP, 2007), most researchers now agree that some kind of form focused instruction (e.g. grammar presentations) improve language learning in both the short and the long term. More quotes and posts on this coming once I finish it.

Students rarely if ever produce the form being taught in the lesson at the production stage at the end of a PPP lesson, let alone accurately.

In my experience, this is true. However, such use can be instantly improved by not having the free production stage at the end of the same lesson as when you present the language for the first time but next week after they have had time to absorb the language a little and do their homework. On a CELTA training course it is not often possible to do this, but once the trainees know how to do all the stages they can easily experiment when they start teaching with seperating them into different lessons- all that needs to be done on the course is point out the fact that they can do so.

Researchers have moved onto the Task-Based Approach, so it’s about time teacher training caught up

Again, what researchers focus their attention on can often be taken with a pinch of salt. “After all, currently discredited methodologies such as audiolingualism or the cognitive code approach once had widespread support from researchers and theoreticians” (Jack C. Richards, ibid). Tasks happen to be something that are tailor-made for classroom-based research. Whether they are also tailor-made for classroom-based teaching is still yet to be proved, I believe. Also, in this case even pro-TBA researchers have even yet to agree on what a good task, good task-based classroom approach and good task-based syllabus might be.

While all these questions remain up in the air, I don’t see how someone can be taught TBA in a four-week training course. When I was a teacher trainer on a TEFL course I was quite happy to admit the unfashionability of PPP, show Cutting Edge and tell how it is (was?) the latest thing and how it was supposed to work. I was not prepared to let them have a go at it in the classroom instead of PPP, and I should point out that even people who had read their Harmer and knew the holes in the PPP theory did not exactly ask to try out a method they knew was more complicated for the teacher. Anyway, if you know how to do TTT in all its variations it really isn’t that far off from TBA.

If they get trained in PPP, it is so rigid that they will never be able to break free from it and try other approaches

This might be true for some people, but most of the people using approaches like TBA now were trained in PPP.

Conclusion

On an initial teacher training course teachers need to learn how to teach grammar (as well as skills, functional language, pron etc.), and the quickest, easiest and most practical method for them to pick up first is PPP (and its variation TTT). However, they should be told about the theoretical and practical problems with the method and about the available variations (e.g. spreading the 3 stages over weeks not over 1 lesson) and options (e.g. TBA). Exceptional trainees who have PPP down the pat over the first couple of weeks (very few!) should be allowed to experiment with other methods.

Thanks to Appy Linguist for mentioning the PPP approach while talking about the CELTA because I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while. The question is: should teachers still be trained to teach PPP and it’s offshoot (or bastard offspring, depending on your point of view) TTT? First of all, to recap what they mean:

In PPP (presentation, practice and production), you present a language point, students do some controlled practice of the language and then they are given a freer speaking task to do where they can produce the language you have presented and practiced if they wish. TTT (test, teach, test) is similar, but you test the students on their knowledge and ability to use the language you want to teach first, see where the hole in their language is and then do the stages in PPP. The possible things you can do at each stage are:

Presentation

1. Write an example of a grammatical form up on the board and translate it into the students’ language
2. And/ or write an example of a grammatical form up on the board and explain what the name of the form is, how it is used and what it means (in English or in L1*)
3. Do the same as 1 or 2, but eliciting the translation or explanation from the students
4. Do the reverse of 1 or 2, providing a sentence in L1 for translation or giving the name or meaning of the form and getting students to provide an example sentence
5. Do the same as 4, but eliciting the form with a cue such as a picture, a story, a gapped sentence or a timeline*
6. After a listening, reading or video watching activity, pull examples of the form you want to teach out of the text and do the same as 1 to 5 above
7. Do the same as 6, but providing the explanation, translation etc. as asking students to find examples in the texts
8. Students do any one of 1 to 7 above, but individually or in pairs from their textbooks or a worksheet. Check answers as a whole class.

Once you are sure that all the students understand the meaning and construction of the form you want to teach (this stage usually includes a few concept check questions to make sure that is in fact the case), you are ready to move onto the practice stage

Practice

1. Students are drilled on more sentences similar to the one used in the presentation, making sure their pronunciation is okay 
2. Students translate more sentences with the form in to and/ or from English
3. Students complete multiple choice, gap fill etc. written tasks including the form being taught
4. Students produce examples of the form based on prompts provided by the teacher or textbooks (e.g. book- I like reading books, flower- I like picking flowers etc.)
5. Students produce examples of the form to answer questions by the teacher or in the textbook (When did uyou have breakfast? I had breakfast at 8:15), either their own real answers or based on cues in the textbook
6. Students ask questions with the form being taught to match answers given by the teacher or in the textbook (I was walking down the street- What were you doing when you last met your best friend?- That’s right)
7. Countless other speaking and/ or writing games that involve a limited range of language
8. Any of the production activities below, but with students being told to use the form being taught or even to only use the form being taught

It is possible to use two or more of the practice activities above, often moving from very controlled (e.g. drilling) to freer (e.g. language games).

Now that students are capable of making some correct sentences with the form being taught, they are ready for the next stage. In the practice stage above, even when the tasks are, in the best of cases, genuinely communicative (that is, students learn some real information about each other they didn’t know before) they still use an unrealisitically limited amount of language. Hopefully, the students are now ready to try to use the same structures in a situation where a lot of other different language could also come up.

Production

1. Roleplays
2. Writing longer texts like stories, letters etc.
3. Problem solving and logic puzzles
4. Many many more which don’t spring to mind at the moment

I’m going to deal with the criticisms of PPP in PPP RIP? Part Two, but before I forget a point that has just occured to me, I would like to say that modern so-called PPP classes, textbooks and teacher training courses tend to include just as much emphasis on skills development as on items of language taught through PPP- a point often forgotten by both critics and defenders due the fact that the name is not PPPPS (PPP plus skills) or such like. It’s amazing how much a snappy acronym* can change history

*L1- The students’ first language, e.g. Spanish

*Timeline- A picture of wiggly lines, straight lines and crosses that is supposed to show the time connections of different tenses

* Acronym- Strictly this is not an acronym because it is not pronounced like a word (like NATO), but I don’t know what it really is, so on this blog an acronym it remains