Presentation, practice and production (PPP) is a procedure in which the teacher introduces a situation which contextualises the language to be taught. The language too is then presented. The students then practice the language using accurate reproduction techniques such as choral repetition with the teacher conducting, individual repetition and cue-response drills (when the teacher gives a cue or stimulus such as a question, nominates a student and the student offers a response, using the cue given).
Example: Teacher: „home”-Student: „Are you going home?” This method has similarities with the classic audio-lingual drills, but because they are contextualised by the situation that has been presented they carry more meaning than a simple substitution drill. Later, the students make sentences of their own, and is referred to as production.
Elementary-level exemple of PPP:
a. Presentation
The teacher shows the students a picture and asks them whether it is summer or winter, trying to elicit the fact that they are on holiday. The teacher points to the woman and attempts to elicit the phrase „She is sunbathing” by saying „Can anybody tell me…she’s…?” or asking the question „What’s she doing?”. The teacher then models the sentence „She’s sunbathing” emphasising the grammar structure „She’s…she is…”, putting it back together „she’s…she is” and then giving the model in a natural way once more. The teacher may accompany this demonstration by using the finger technique or the two hands technique (bringing both hands together-for he and is-to show the contraction.
b. Practice
The teacher gets the students to repeat the sentence „She’s sunbathing” in chorus.
He may then nominate certain students to repeat the sentence individually and he corrects any mistakes he might hear. After that, the teacher goes back and models more sentences from the picture „John is swimming”, „The children are playing volleyball”, getting choral and individual repetition. Then he is in the position to conduct a slightly freer kind of drill than the Audio-Lingual one. By cuing before nominating, the teacher keeps everyone alert and also by a random nomination. Teacher: cue- „girl”, Student: drill- „The girl is surfing”.
c. Production
The final stage of PPP cycle, which some trainers have called immediate creativity, requires students to use the new language (in our case present continuous) in sentences of their own. For example, the teacher may get the students to imagine that they are in a park, on holiday. They must say what each of them is doing. Or they may be given different pictures to describe, or they may be asked to say what they think their friends and relatives are doing at the moment.
Other alternatives to PPP are ARC (authentic use, restricted use and clarification), OHE (observe, hypothesise and experiment), III (illustration, interaction, induction), ESA (engage, study, activate).
Presentation, practice and production procedure came under attack in 1990s because it was considered teacher-centred and limited in providing language functions. It was also considered a non-communicative activity, its main purpose being accuracy.
References:
Harmer, Jeremy. 2005. The Practice of English Language Teaching. Pearson Education ESL; 5th Edition edition
edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Educational_technology