PPP RIP? Part Two
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.
August 23rd, 2007 at 9:09 pm
Dear Alex,
I have heard that educational theories are rather like big red London buses - if you miss one you can always hop on the next one.
tired, tortured & tense in Tunisia
August 23rd, 2007 at 11:28 pm
Jane Doe, you have totally outdone me by summarizing two whole posts in a single sentence! In the book I mentioned Jack C. Richards gives a Groucho Marx quote that does pretty much the same:
“Of course I have principles. And if you don’t like these, I have others”
PS- If your family worries anything like my family, I wouldn’t use tortured in an Islamic country even as a joke….
August 26th, 2007 at 1:33 pm
I’d forgot about TTT - we were told about it, in not too much details, on our CELTA course. Thanks for the recent PPP/TTT posts, it’s been really interesting.
August 27th, 2007 at 11:55 am
Thanks for the feedback Laurent. Only skimmed over TTT, so might tackle it again if I remember. How about TTT= TBA (test teach test= the task-based approach) anyone?
August 29th, 2007 at 6:16 am
There is often a need to focus Ss attention to certain aspects of a new structure, whether that’s its form, pronunciation or collocation before leading on to personalisation, as found in variants on PPP. This is especially true when you consider the different types of learner you may be dealing with in a single class.
There! I said it……
August 29th, 2007 at 6:41 am
I don’t know if anyone else is old enough to remember when only old men in Britain drank Guinness, but admitting that there might be something good about PPP is like the adverts they first brought out when they tried to make Guinness trendy:
Men drilling himself outside pub “I’ll have a Guinness. I’ll have a Guinness. I’ll have a Guinness”. Walks into pub and blurts out: “A pint of lager please”
August 30th, 2007 at 11:59 am
I think analysis of learner errors tends to suggest three main types of ‘errors’.
1) There can be influence from the L1 - but not all learners make the same mistakes.
2) There can be influence from other L2s - also varied.
3) There seems to be some sort of ‘interlanguage’, by which learners of quite different backgrounds appear to learn the language in a similar pattern to the general structure used with L1 acquisition - grammatical morphemes tend to follow a certain order, for instance. Yet this can also vary due to points (1) and (2).
PPP/TTT are more about what makes the teacher feel good. They’re about product-teaching - as if language is ‘out there’ and it’s more teachable than learnable. Most methods over the years - including most mainstream EFL today - have been mainly product-teaching. But it does not gel with how learners learn.
A more process-teaching approach, with the idea that language is more learnable than teachable, and that language happens in your head (along with between people… so on the innatist/constructivist interface), would reflect how learners learn/acquire an L2.
So is there any real reason to continue training people on a 4-week course in such a product-teaching approach as PPP/TTT? Me, I don’t think so. It makes the teacher feel like they’re in control, but the aim should be primarily to train teachers who will help their students learn, in my view.
Admittedly, a 4-week course will never be sufficient for training proper professionals. But it seems to think that it is. I remember on my CELTA course back in the ’90s two of the other trainees failed, seemingly because they didn’t understand that they had to follow the rigid TTT method. They wasted their money and probably never set foot in an ELT classroom again. And that’s a pity, as they could have been great teachers - both seemed to be motivated to teach and they were interested in their students. But the RSA/UCLES ’system’ - for that’s what it is - determined their fate. What a joke!
August 31st, 2007 at 1:00 am
Having been a CTEFLA (although not Cambridge) trainer, I have never seen anyone come off a course a worse teacher. To use something that is easier to gauge than the amount of learning going on, the students they are teaching are always happier with the classes the trainees give at the end of the course than those at the beginning. In fact, they often comment that they didnt think it was possible for a teacher to improve so much in four weeks. Having said that, what trainees learn in 4 weeks is indeed limited.
I couldnt really work out from your comments what kind of methodolgy your would introduce on a 4 week course and how you would do it, but if you would like to expand on this theme as a guest writer Im always looking for new ideas.
August 31st, 2007 at 3:07 am
I think that in four intensive weeks there’s time for trainee teachers to gain a sufficient, but admittedly basic, understanding of how learners learn and of how to teach in a way that encourages (adult) learners to become more aware of how they learn as individuals.
I think there’s even time to teach the trainees something about language, too, which many TEFLers are embarrassingly clueless about.
And there’s time to help the trainees learn about the real importance of affect and motivation, which in my understanding - unless there’s been a significant change to CELTA etc - is otherwise totally ignored.
Of course, all this means not spending time on PPP/TTT. But those are just ‘methods’, just like audiolingualism, grammar-translation, and so on. I’m referring to a course that deals with ‘methodology’, which I define as how we can use what we know about SLA and different approaches to language teaching in order to inform the teaching process.
Sure, four weeks isn’t the same as a year spent on an MA, for instance. But a little bit of something that has a body of research behind it makes more sense than a little bit of something that doesn’t. To clarify that: basically all modern research into SLA indicates that PPP/TTT does not reflect how learners learn, and so to continue training people to teach in that way because ‘that’s how things are done’ is somewhat strange.
I’ll see if I can write a decent and clear post on the topic within the next month, and then I’ll blog it and let you know.
August 31st, 2007 at 6:11 am
Okay, look forward to it. I dont want to prejudge, so will hold my comments back until then in case you answer my questions before I ask them.
March 26th, 2008 at 8:32 am
can anyone give me advantages and disadvantages or PPP??
March 26th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
Grace, it’s funny you should ask that, because I started writing an article on that yesterday that I should finish next week and get up on Usingenglish.com in the next 2 weeks or so