Teaching Methods
1. PPP(3P)——presentation, practice, production
The Teaching Process for EFL
During your SEE TEFL certification course you will become more familiar with an established methodology for teaching English as a foreign language known as 3Ps or PPP – presentation, practice, production. The PPP method could be characterized as a common-sense approach to teaching as it consists of 3 stages that most people who have learnt how to do anything will be familiar with.
The first stage is the presentation of an aspect of language in a context that students are familiar with, much the same way that a swimming instructor would demonstrate a stroke outside the pool to beginners.
The second stage is practice, where students will be given an activity that gives them plenty of opportunities to practice the new aspect of language and become familiar with it whilst receiving limited and appropriate assistance from the teacher. To continue with the analogy, the swimming instructor allowing the children to rehearse the stroke in the pool whilst being close enough to give any support required and plenty of encouragement.
The final stage is production where the students will use the language in context, in an activity set up by the teacher who will be giving minimal assistance, like the swimming instructor allowing his young charges to take their first few tentative strokes on their own.
2. TTT—— Test, teach, test
TTT is an approach to teaching where learners first complete a task or activity without help from the teacher. Then, based on the problems seen, the teacher plans and presents the target language. Then the learners do another task to practise the new language.
Example:The learners, who have not studied phrasal verbs, are given a text and asked to find examples. They are able to do this but not to deduce meaning. The teacher plans a lesson to help learners develop this, and then asks them to do a similar activity.
In the classroom
TTT is a useful approach as it enables teachers to identify the specific needs of learners concerning a language area and address this need suitably. It can be particularly useful at intermediate levels and above, where learners may have seen language before, but have specific problems with it, and also in mixed level classes to help identify objectives for each individual.
3. TBL
Task based learning is a different way to teach languages. It can help the student by placing her in a situation like in the real world. A situation where oral communication is essential for doing a specific task. Task based learning has the advantage of getting the student to use her skills at her current level. To help develop language through its use. It has the advantage of getting the focus of the student toward achieving a goal where language becomes a tool, making the use of language a neccissity.
4. OHE
First of all they [learners] observe language in use, for example through listening to or reading a text. Then they make hypotheses about the way that language works and experiment with creating it themselves in their own contexts.
Observation isn’t just a case of receiving language input but also submitting it to critical examination. Otherwise, it will be impossible to make hypotheses about language behaviour. The hypothesising and experimenting stages involve activities such as identifying, sorting and matching and their aim is to encourage curiosity about language and among learners. We as teachers need to take a longer term view of learning and cannot expect to limit language to a single structure and presume this has been learnt by the end of the class (as PPP advocates) because language learning simply doesn’t work like that.
5. Guided discovery learning
Guided discovery learning is a constructivist instructional design model that combines principles from discovery learning and sometimes radical constructivism with principles from cognitivist instructional design theory.
“ Students discover knowledge without guidance, developing their own understanding. The role of instruction is merely to provide a suitable environment, which in software might be a microworld or simulation. Discovery learning, or instructionless learning, involves hypothesis formulation and testing
6. text-based
7. Situational (context-based)
Guided Discovery
text >noticing target language in contaxt, range of examples of TL
Work out the rules
Controlled practice excises (productive)