The Presentation, Practice, Production (PPP) model of English Language Teaching (ELT) is much more pervasive and insidious than we seem to realize. I was talking to a teacher yesterday who reached out to discuss a situation she’s going through with a learner. She mentioned she had long abandoned the PPP and its offspring, such as test-teach-test, presentation – controlled practice – freer practice, and has been teaching through a more conversational, DOGME-esque approach to ELT.
She said she spends most of the time talking and interacting with the student, but was a bit disappointed that the student could not transfer what they practiced during the class to conversation in that class or the following one. She also mentioned that, at the end of the classes, she asks ‘more targeted questions’ to check whether the student understood and remembered the feedback she gave him during the lesson. Much to her disappointment, she said the student could not remember part of the feedback and was not able to use that emergent language correctly at the end of the lesson.
Notice how, even without teaching a PPP-based class, some PPP-esque principles and beliefs are still very much in action in her DOGME classes. For instance, why is there ‘practice’ in a conversation-based class? Also, are students supposed to remember and/or acquire a piece of language taught or commented on by the end of the lesson? The PPP goes beyond the mere arrangement of lesson stages – it’s an approach to ELT with its own set of principles and beliefs.
At its core, PPP-based ELT atomizes language – breaks it into tiny pieces – organizes it in a neat sequence, and expects teachers to deliver these pieces to students whilst also expecting students to learn these pieces incrementally and have them available for use in the next lesson. It’s a mathematical process. It’s addition. Building blocks. For example, PPP-based ELT expects teachers to teach the third person singular -s in the first couple of classes and expects learners to master it early on in their language learning career. This is not only incredibly unlikely to happen, but it is also cruel. Grammar forms that carry no meaning often take a very long time to be acquired by learners, and there’s nothing teachers can do to get them to learn them in a week. We then wonder why some of our learners say things like “I’m dumb”, “I can’t learn”, “I feel blocked to speak” when mainstream ELT expects accuracy and mastery from a novice learner.
Additionally, PPP-based ELT rests upon the belief that language learning happens through practice. The idea is that students will receive a brief explanation of a piece of language (or ‘discover it themselves’ as in guided discovery), will engage in a series of practice exercises, from more controlled to less controlled, and this practice leads students to automatize language. Notice how language learning in this perspective is a fully conscious endeavour up until the point that the student automatizes the language and then is able to stop thinking about it. PPP-based ELT focuses on ‘noticing’ language, understanding how it works, and practicing this language til you’re blue in the face and automatize it. It’s easy to see PPP’s appeal: it offers a clear structure, measurable outcomes for lesson plans, and a sense of control for teachers and curriculum designers – and an easy way to package and sell ELT. However, this perceived neatness fundamentally misrepresents the messy, organic process of language acquisition.
When thinking about moving away from PPP-based ELT, teachers must also relinquish these beliefs. Language cannot be atomized and broken into pieces. These pieces cannot be organized on a conveyor belt. These pieces cannot be taught and learned in isolation and mastered one after the other. Language taught today will very rarely be available tomorrow. Language learning is, ultimately, a much more holistic, analytical, implicit, and incidental process.
Where PPP-based ELT would expect teachers to feed students pieces of language, practice these, and assess at the end of the lesson (“By the end of the lesson, students should be able to use the present simple to talk about routines” – and the whole shtick.), DOGME ELT and Task-based Learning will see students as learners of the language who acquire it through meaningful use in meaning-focused tasks through time, not in atomized, individual lessons. Learners’ development of their interlanguage is much more complex than a simple incremental addition of newly mastered grammar forms and vocabulary; it is a fluid process, with lots of backsliding, U-shaped development, and plateaus. The moment teachers decide to move away from PPP-based ELT towards more current, research-informed approaches, old principles and beliefs will have to be let go of.
And by the way, PPP-based ELT is not communicative language teaching; it is practice-based language teaching. It’s the return of Situational Language Teaching in disguise.
Situational Language Teaching (SLT) is a British-developed approach from the 1930s-1960s that teaches language through structured, meaningful situations to develop practical skills. It uses a Presentation-Practice-Production (PPP) model to present grammar and vocabulary, emphasizing accuracy and oral skills through repetition and guided practice in specific contexts, often using visual aids like pictures and role-playing. The goal is to build language habits and enable learners to use English in realistic, real-world scenarios.
ELT in Brazil 
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