This is in part a cautionary tale on the perils of frivolity. I had drafted a post on PPP last week before being distracted by writing a jokey piece on the ownership of authors – and was pipped at the post by none other than Scott Thornbury. After enjoying Scott’s video on PPP and the comment it generated, I’ve decided to post my original piece anyway – followed by a brief update. You can’t have too much PPP! Can you?

Two weeks ago I shared an enjoyable chat with Fiona Mauchline, Mike Harrison and Jeremy Harmer as the latter tweeted from the iH DoS conference in London and we mused on the enduring appeal of grammar to teachers and learners.

‘People have predicted the death of/lamented the predominance of [the] grammar syllabus for decades,’ Jeremy tweeted, ‘but it is DEEPLY ingrained.’ The same is true, I suggested, of PPP – we act as if it it’s gone away but, like Take That, it hasn’t.

In case like me you sometimes have to do a double take on PPP, it stands for Present, Practice, Produce: in conventional lesson planning these function as distinct phases within a lesson. However loosely it is applied, PPP encodes not only three archetypal classroom behaviours, but also the belief that language needs to be identified and explained before it is used and experienced in context.

Dogme classes are different. For a start, we change the Ps around. Language is seen as being best explored as it emerges from conversation, or when encountered in real texts – spoken and written. We then pause to examine this language together, offering explanation where it is likely to be useful, and highlighting patterns that can help with recognition and production. And then we typically resume the conversation, perhaps suggesting an activity or reference point for further practice after the lesson.

In addition to being in the wrong order, the P-words aren’t quite right. ‘Produce’ sounds as it all too often is in the PPP context – a somewhat mechanical phase at the end of a process. ‘Present’ is a little too top-down to fit what happens when we look at language through the learners’ eyes and refresh the way we approach and explain it. ‘Practice’ on the other hand is about right, whatever processes are adopted.

So the fit isn’t exact, and the process can be repeated many times within a lesson, but this is what I tweeted: ‘I see it as cyclical – speak (produce?), select and reflect (present?), speak more (practice?). Ghost PPP …’

If it is the ghost of PPP, it may be a benevolent one: PPP is less harmful than it is wasteful of classroom opportunity. But it’s also increasingly ill-suited to the learners of today and tomorrow who come to class needing less to be told and more to be heard. And one can’t help feeling that – like coursebooks – PPP retains a role in training courses and school classrooms because it benefits the inexperienced teacher as much as it does the learner.

What do other people think?

. . . . .

(After viewing Scott’s video and reading the comment!)

I like the idea of dealing economically with the first two Ps, and I can see that one function or by-product of its use in class may be priming. I think we all agree that personalisation is desirable. But even if PPP is tempered by personalisation, or reframed as priming, I’m not sure it will do. In fact the more I think about it, the more it bothers me, for three (yes! there must be three) reasons:

- It narrows the scope of the lesson

- It reifies the language unit at the expense of the language system: learners are often challenged less by the ‘units’ and more by the ‘complex’ of language as encountered outside the classroom

- A production phase in which people attempt to fit presented language into a more or less communicative context is profoundly counter-intuitive, and is therefore frustrating for all concerned

Finally, I also liked on Scott’s blog Anthony Gaughan’s recast of PPP as something the learners can manage and do – a theme pursued in comment by Stephen Herder. Amazing things happen (in theory and practice) when we think less about the teacher, and more about the learner. How does Willy Cardoso put it? Oh, like this.

INDEXER’S NOTE: The phrase ‘PPP’ doesn’t appear in Teaching Unplugged, but that doesn’t mean there’s no indexing work for me to do. In fact there’s so much, and it’s so interesting, that it’s going to be the subject of my next blog.