UNIPAMPA

Lingustica Aplicada ao Ensino de Lngua Inglesa II

Professora: Simone Assumpo

Aluna: Sheila Machado

Summary of

A critical review of the Presentation-Practice-Production model

by Rachel Criado

According to the text, the PPP model originated in the mid 20th century and was adoted by the Structural Methods (the North American Audiolingual method, the British Situational Language Teaching Method and the French Audiovisual Method). The Structural Methods were very rigid apporaches that were seen as a solution to achieve fast-learning of a foreing language. The Structural Method has been and is still very criticized, consequently so is the PPP model. The biggest opposers to this model are the defenders of the Lexical Approach and the Task-based Language Teaching. The text aims to address the major criticisms (positive and negative) over the PPP sequence model.

Its important to remember that the PPP is not a method or an approach, it is rather a pedagogical strategy. Its composed of three Ps, and each one of them stands for:

1 P - Presentation: the first step, its very teacher focused. It can be deductive (when the teacher models the target structure or lexical items); or it can be inductive (when teacher or the material provides sample structures or contextualized vocabulary and the students are required to unveil the underlying rules and meanings);

2 P - Practice: the second step is still very teacher focused in the sense that the students are perfoming controlled activities, which the object is to achieve accuracy of forms;

3 P - Production: its the last step and its focus is on the students, they are asked to perform more autonomous and creative activities such as debates, role-plays, discussion, problem-solving, opinion or information gaps, etc.

The text goes on to explain the various criticism this model has received. Starting with the positive criticism, which are divided into:

1. Positive criticism at the psychological level

The PPP sequence draws highly accordance to the declarative and procedural knowledge idea, which states that there are three stages towards knowledge attainment: declarative (about the system), procedural (how to use the system) and automatic (when you dont need to be thinking of what your doing/saying/producing)

2. Positive criticism at the psycholinguistic level

This part of the text is a little curious because it explains about the benefits of output practice, which are many, nonethless I dont think this has to do exclusively with the PPP sequence, but rather any method or approach or strategy which enables students output.

3. Positive criticism at the pedagogical level

Criado explains that, according to theory, when the classes follow a pattern and are, therefore, predictable, the students feel more comfortable and that is specially good to decrease their anxiety and increase their focus and attention, which is very important for better learning.

The negative criticisms are:

1. At the linguistic level

Two elements are viewed as faults about the PPP model. The first being the fact that the model focus on the learning of strucutes rather than on meaning and vocabulary. According to Lewis (1996) PPP is useless because it is focused on a linguistic component which is not the core of communication use: structure. Lewis favors lexicon (collocations, idioms, multi-word items, etc).

The next fault is the fact that PPP has a atomistic nature, the author uses the words of Descartes to illustrate this nature as the fact that things should be divided up the better to study them

2. At the psycholiguistic level

The PPP favors a quantitative type of learning. The learning path is extremely rigid and seems to be based on the assumption that the PPP sequence suffices for the acquisition of knowledge.

3. At the psycholinguistic level

the focus of PPP being on the accuracy of forms rather than on meaning can be very dismotivating for students. The mechanical drills used by this strategy are nothing like real-life communication. The general characteristics of the PPP model disrespect three major principals of psycholiguistics: readiness-to-learn, delayed-effect-of-instruction and the silent period.

The readiness to learn has major consequences in material design both in activity and language content ordering. Students follow a natural acquisition sequence, and that is process that takes a long a time and is not fully predictable.

Delayed-effect-of-instruction says that it is unrealistc to expect students to make acquaintance with a new language and, within the space of a single lesson, incorporate it into their working grammar of the language.

The silent period is a crucial psycholinguistic principle for beginners. It says that learners will not speak before they feel they possess sufficient linguistic resources.

The final claim of the article is about the contemporary FLT materials version of PPP. The author claims that there have been many small changes in PPP throughout the last decades. Whereas most of the negative criticism relies on the fact that PPP was a major strategy used by Structural Methods (which are reasonably outdated methods).

According to the text, this new wave of materials which rely on the PPP model follow this principles: language elements are not reduced to structures; focused and unfocused skill activities; more attention is given to meaning; increasing in variety of activities, hence the reduction of its rigid and repetitive patterns;