A Critical Review of The PPP Model

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;

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UNIPAMPA

Lingustica Aplicada ao Ensino de Lngua Inglesa II

A critical review of the Presentation-Practice-Production model

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