The Problem with PPP

PPP stands for Presentation, Practice, Production and it is perhaps the dominant teaching method in Japanese junior high schools. PPP means that teachers will first present a grammar point, for example, present perfect, have students practice it, and then give them some kind of activity where they are expected to produce it. This way of teaching is efficient because it is easy for students to follow. Although I would probably use this method sometimes if I was a JHS teacher, I think it is important to recognize the problems of this method.

First, although a lot of teachers say that the field of Second Language Acquisition is completely useless for teaching, it does reveal a limitation of PPP. That is that learners acquire grammar structures (for example, the regular past tense) gradually after passing through various developmental stages. PPP might give the learners and teachers the false impression that learners should have mastered the particular grammatical structure after the presentation, practice and production. It is only through constant exposure and use that learners acquire a grammatical structure though.

This leads to the second and in my opinion the biggest limitation. In a PPP lesson, Learners and teachers might think that the goal of using English in class is to show that they know a particular structure but this could be counterproductive to their language learning. In my opinion, the most important goal for language use in the classroom is for learners to learn how to build their fluency in English and learn the communicative strategies necessary for them to make the best use of the knowledge that they have. As teachers, we also want learners to make the effort to learn from their miscommunications and errors to become more accurate and effective communicators. In other words, the major limitation of PPP could be that it leads learners and teachers to ignore the most important goals of communicative activities.