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Is PPP dead?
Jeremy Harmer

The teacher begins to draw on the board: some lines, a curve. She encourages the students to guess what she is doing or to ask questions Is it a football? Is it a face? etc. It is a face and she and the class establish a name for it, Peter. Now the teacher draws vertical lines across Peter so that he ends up like this:

The teacher and the students establish that Peter is in prison and then through explanation, gesture and mime she gets over the meaning of the sentence He cant drink beer. After modelling the sentence - and isolating parts of it, e.g. cant = cannot - she gets students to repeat in chorus before asking for individual repetition.

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Soon there are six statements about Peter (He cant drive his car but h e can watch TV in the prisoners lounge etc) which the teacher uses to get quick and accurate repetition/practice.

Finally the teacher asks students to say some of things they can and cannot do in law/school etc, for example I can buy food in the canteen but I cant take it into the library. Later, perhaps the students write sentences.

Most teachers will recognise this simple (and simplistic?) teaching sequence as an example of PPP: presentation (setting up the situation, modelling the new language), practice (controlled and accurate drilling of six sentences) and production (students making real sentences about themselves).

PPP is frequently used for grammar patterns, dialogues and even vocabulary teaching. It is one of the methodological sequences which has gained most acceptance throughout the English-Language-Teaching world as any glance at textbooks will show.

PPP under attack

In the last few years, however, PPP has come under concerted attack. Is it the best way to teach/learn new language? Can language be cut up into little bits anyway? Does PPP actually work? Michael Lewis has no doubts: ...the model (PPP) is discredited and reflects neither the nature of language nor the nature of learning. (Lewis 1993:190). More recently Scrivener (1994a), Willis (1994) and Woodward (1993), for example, have ganged up to attack it even more forcefully. Woodward writes:

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(The PPP) model seems to be firmly rooted in the tradition of thought springing from Descartes who believed that things should be divided up the better to study them. This analytic view of study is in contrast to the growing feeling in our own time that more holistic or ecological ways of looking at interlocking variables and systems might be healthier. (1993:3)

Willis lists six things that are wrong with PPP, but Scrivener (1994a) tops the bill with 8, accusing PPP of being theoretically groundless, of making assumptions about straight-line learning, of being based on sentence-level theories of language and much more. Most damningly he writes that it ..is fundamentally disabling, not enabling. (1994: 15).

Leaving aside the fact that this may come as a surprise to the many hundreds of thousands of students who have managed to progress despite having been subjected to such discredited disablement, one cannot help feeling along with Hopkins (1995) that sustained criticism of PPP may be somewhat exaggerated. As he writes:

No language course these days offers an undiluted diet of the dry meaningless PPP structured lessons that so many commentators like to set up as a straw-man foe. (1995:11)

Indeed even ten years ago descriptions of PPP were more flexible than critics seem to imply. Byrne (1986) swaps the straight line of Presentation-Practice and Production for a flexible circle like this:

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Production

Presentation

Practice

so that a teaching sequence might start with a role-play, for example (production) and as a result of problems encountered there the teacher might then (re)-present some language before organising a bit of practice. The same three elements are present, but their variable sequencing allows for a range of teaching options.

Describing teaching sequences

The need to describe teaching sequences - both for trainees and as principles to guide materials writers - has led many of PPPs critics to propose alternative models themselves. And even those of us who are not prepared to be so destructively dogmatic about teaching practices which have served teachers and learners well over the years recognise the need to re-position contemporary versions of PPP in a wider

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methodological framework. Such a framework will include PPP as one of many procedures which modern EFL teachers have at their disposal. PPP is not discredited, in our view, though its use may be considerably more restricted than it was twenty years ago!

The rest of this article will look at alternatives to PPP and try to assess their claims to be an all-inclusive methodology.

Task-based learning
All people need to learn a language; according to Pit Corder (1986) is exposure to it and a reason for learning it. Willis (forthcoming) suggests three basic qualities for language learners outside classrooms: Exposure to the language, Motivation to learn it and opportunities to Use it. Task-based learning provides those three conditions and, in some versions, claims to sidestep and ignore the more traditional syllabusbased presentation and practice. The extraordinary Bangalore Project, described in many articles and memorably in Prabhu (1987) made just such claims.

Other writers on task-based learning have seen the need for some kind of language study, however. Willis (1994 and forthcoming) suggests a fourth stage when languages are learnt inside a classroom. After students are exposed to language, plan their own task and report on its execution they then listen to fluent speakers doing the same task to compare their versions. They are in a position to do some Language Analysis - what Willis calls Review and planning.

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Willis version of task-based learning is, in the words of a trainee in Turkey ...like a sort of PPP upside down. The steps are there, but in a different order. (Willis 1984:19)

Task-based learning has many advantages, of course. It allows students to see the relevance of their study, it may well be motivating (though of course that depends upon the task, the class and the teacher), and the way students process language during task planning and execution is seen as beneficial for language, personal and intellectual development.

Two caveats occur to me, however. Firstly the completion of meaningful tasks depends upon the students language ability before they start. For beginners, therefore, the range of motivating tasks may be limited. On top of that the procedure may be time-consuming where other more standard routines may help students learn more quickly. Task-based learning may feel better, in other words, but is it any more efficient?

Nevertheless Task-based learning is a powerful alternative to PPP-type lessons, especially for students at higher levels.

The impact of discovery techniques

One of the big movements in the 1980s was the utilisation of discovery learning. Lewis (1986) echoed the prevailing mood when he wrote that

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All learning theory suggests that those things we discover for ourselves are more firmly fixed in our minds than those which we are 'told'....In place of blind 'learning', the emphasis has moved to the process of exploration which leads to genuine understanding. (1986: )

Despite the fact that the evidence is somewhat sketchy, we have accepted the philosophical claims for the superiority of finding things out for ourselves. Students are not so readily persuaded, however, as Fortune found out (Fortune 1992). When he asked his subjects to choose between a basic transmission model (PPP) of teaching on the one hand and student-centred discovery on the other 68% of them initially chose the former!

Nevertheless, discovery has become a focus for learning and it forms a part of a more reflective methodology. For example Lewis 3 stages for language learning - OHE - (Lewis 1993) comprise Observation of language, Hypothesis-formation on the basis of that observation and Experimentation to see if the hypotheses are correct.

This kind of discovery-based observation gains added impetus with studies showing how real language use - especially spoken language differs markedly from the tidier structure-based organisation of many traditional materials. Maule (1988) sat watching his television writing down any if-sentences he heard. He found that the construction of such sentences was usually very different from the 3-conditional description found in many textbooks. Yule et al (1992) observed that people dont seem to report direct speech in the ways we teach EFL students to do., quoting examples of real language use where American English

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speakers are just as likely to use to be like (Im like you OK? and hes like yeah Im OK) as they are to use say and tell.

Most recently Carter & McCarthy (1995) and McCarthy & Carter (1995) have demonstrated how, on the basis of a relatively small corpus of spoken language, the rules of spoken grammar are uniquely different from the more formalised patterns which are often laid before students in syllabuses and textbooks. Their methodological response to this is to propose a new procedure, III. In McCarthy & Carter, examples show the model in operation where students are provided with an Illustration of language (they read the transcript of a conversation), and then take part in an Interaction with it (they discuss what words - like auxiliaries and subjects - are left out) before becoming aware of how the language works so that Induction of the rules they have discovered through illustration and interaction may take place.

Such reflective discovery has much to recommend it. It allows students to be reflective, to think about the language and it gives them a chance to see real language at work as an alternative to the sanitised examples some textbooks and teachers provide. But there are problems too: language discovery is less impressive at lower levels - where it is more difficult to provide comprehensible authentic illustration - than at higher ones. Nor have we decided whether we want to actually teach aspects of spoken interaction or just have the students notice it. And despite the pioneering work of Tribble & Johns (1990) evidence from language corpuses has not yet been made friendly enough for general student use. Finally in Carter & McCarthys work we may question how much benefit is gained (for speakers of non-native English) from

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studying a restricted variety of informal spoken English of a particularly British kind.