Centered on behavioural philosophy, PPP suggests that learning a language is just like mastering some other function. The high degree of instructor supervision that characterizes the first and second phases of this process decreases as the class advances, allowing the learner to steadily shift away from the teacher’s guide for more autonomous learning and comprehension [1].
PPP is a three-part learning paradigm: Presentation, Practice and Production [2]. The first step, which is Presentation, enables learners to acquire new linguistic information or to restructure information that has been wrongly portrayed. The hope is that interlanguage students will be able to understand as soon as a foreign language is clarified. In subsequent lessons, the latest vocabulary will ‘build’ on top of what has already been taught.
The stage of practice is usually divided into two steps, supervised and free. In supervised practice, the student is engaged in mechanical creation, literally repeating the aim, without having to think about whether to use it. In free exercise, the student prefers to use the target and could be required to control the form. The assumption here is that the learner knows the types of the target language, but that repetition is essential to internalize the framework. It is a conceptual approach to learning, a process that leads to mastery.
The stage of production is when the student has to decide if and when to use the ‘learning’ system. It is a matter of much controversy whether this section of the class is communicative, but this stage of the lesson should be shown to the PPP instructor whether the student mastered the ‘language unit’ by using it in the ‘natural’ context or action.
[1] P. Maftoon and S. N. Sarem 2012 A critical look at the presentation, practice, production (PPP) approach: Challenges and promises for ELT Broad Res. Artif. Intell. Neurosci vol. 3 no 4 pp 31-36
[2] D. Evans, “A Review of “PPP‟. University of Birmingham,” no. 3, pp. 1–8, 1999.
Taken from Wiyanah, S., Irawan, R., & Kurniawan, J. (2021). Using PPP method in the process of online training and strengthening EFL teachers’ pedagogic competence. Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 1823(2021). 1-5. doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1823/1/012010. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.