According to Jeremy Harmer, in his book The Practice of Learning English, Audiolingualism is a
language teaching method and was first referred to in 20th century, by Bloomfield
and Skinner. It was based on behaviorist theory and structural linguistics, and
its main feature consisted in using a positive reinforcement (effort to prevent
student errors), with the use of L2 use only and excessive focus on form (inductive
grammar and accuracy). It also focused on habit-formation through constant
repetition of current utterances, drilling of sentence patterns and substitution,
memorization and pronunciation. In this method, there was no or little placing
of language in any kind of real-life context. As we can see, it was completely
teacher-centered.
As a variation of Audiolingualism came PPP – Presentation, practice and
production – in the mid-60´s, which proposed that language was to be used in
clear situational contexts. Here, the teacher introduces a situation that
contextualizes the language to be taught. Only after that the language is
presented. Students will also use reproduction techniques such as choral
repetition (students repeat a word together, teacher conducts), individual
repetition (one student repeats a word after teacher´s urging) and cue-response
drills (teacher gives a cue such as cinema,
nominates a student and he/she creates, for example, “Would you like to go to
the cinema?”).
In accordance with the author, PPP consists of a cycle, which is divided
into three parts:
1) Presentation: Teacher shows
students a picture and asks them if the people in it are at work or on holiday,
for example. In this case, they are on holiday. Teacher points to a boy in the
picture and says “He´s listening to music”; then she says “Can anybody tell me
……. Jared ……?” or “What´s Jared doing?”. Then teacher models the sentence (“He´s
listening to music”) before isolating the grammar point he/she wants to focus
on (present continuous).
2) Practice: Teacher has the students repeat the sentence “He´s listening
to music” individually or in chorus. She/he corrects the mistakes that might
come up. Now teacher models more sentences from the picture, drilling
individually or in a choral again. Now she/he has more freedom to ask students
to create other sentences, according to the picture that has been shown. For
example, a student says: “She´s reading a book”, and so on. The use of pair
work before students stating their sentences to the class is very effective,
too.
3) Production: the end of the PPP cycle is production, called by some
specialists as “immediate creativity”. In this stage, students are asked to use
the new language, making sentences of their own. For instance, the teacher may
ask students to think about their family or friends and come up with sentences
of their own, for example: “My brother is on holiday now. He´s lying on the
beach”. Even though there was space for students´ production, critics claimed
that it was still too teacher-centered.
Therefore, in the 90´s – explains the author – PPP started to get under
attack, because of its extreme teacher-centered way. Also, the way that it
treated the learning process, as a ‘straight line’, in which students started
from no knowledge at all, going to very restricted utterances and on to
immediate production, was another point of strong criticism; nowadays, we know
that human learning isn´t like that, that it´s more random.
In addition to that, by breaking the language into small pieces, it may have
cheated the students, by leading them to think that the language is full of ‘interlocking
variables and systems’, said Tessa Woodward, in 1993. In the same year, Michael
Lewis suggested that ‘PPP reflected neither the nature of language nor the
nature of learning’. A year later, Jim Scrivener stated that PPP was even ‘disabling,
not enabling’. Another researcher, called Byrne, had suggested, back in the
80´s that the learning process could be a circle, involving presentation,
practice and production all the same, but teachers and students could enter it at
the stage that they chose to, added Harmer.
So ESA came up, in which E
stands for engage, S for study, and A for activate:
1) Engage: arousing students’ curiosity and affect them in some way are
important for successful learning. This way, unless students are emotionally
engaged, learning won´t be as effective as it could be.
2) Study: describes any teaching and learning element where the focus is on
how something is constructed. In this model, study could be a part of focus on
form or a communicative task where the students´ attention to form is drawn to
it by the teacher or through their own activities, noticed by them.
3) Activate: any stage at which students are encouraged to use all the
language they know, for example: communicative tasks, reading for pleasure or
meaning focus activities where the language is not restricted.
The author states that ESA has three basic lesson procedures, Straight
Arrows, Boomerang and Patchwork:
1) Straight Arrows: It´s similar to PPP. The teacher engages the students
by showing them a picture or a situation. At the study stage, meaning and form
of the language are explained. The teacher models the language so students can
repeat and practice it. In the last part, students finally activate the new
language by using it in their own sentences. There are no significant changes
here, and the focus on form is still very strong.
2) Boomerang procedure: It allows a more task-based and deeper approach.
Here the order is EAS; the teacher engages the students before asking them to
perform a task (which may be written or oral) – what would mean to activate.
Only then, having finished the task, will they study the aspects of the
language. This procedure is a good correcting strategy, in a way that it allows
the teacher to identify where the mistakes occurred.
3) Patchwork: It may follow a variety of sequences. For instance, the
teacher may engage the students first and encourage them to activate what they
know before studying the language elements, and then return to more activating
tasks, after which he/she re-engages the students again before doing some more
studying. It seems to be the most varied procedure, since it goes back and
forth, making students to be attentive and busy all the time. It might be a
teachers´ ally, because it won´t leave any space for them to drift and lose
interest.
To conclude, PPP may be very useful when it comes to a form-focused
lesson, especially if we talk about lower levels, where students have a
restricted vocabulary. It´s irrelevant, though, in a skills lesson, where the
focus on form may occur as a result of something that students saw or heard,
not as the main objective of the lesson.
Source: The Practice of Learning English. Jeremy Harmer. Fourth
Edition. Pearson.
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