Revista simpozionului Eficienta si calitate in educatie 2018 Revista simpozionului | Page 52

- students may find easier to use other language resources to complete the task,
so they will not produce the target language during the production stage.
- students will often produce the language but use the target structure too often so
that it sounds completely unnatural and they do not acquire the new language in
this way.
To sum up, PPP represents a simple approach to language learning. The main
idea of this approach is that the language is presented in concise little pieces, new
parts being added from a lesson to the following one. But this approach becomes
less appropriate when students already know a lot of language and therefore do
not need the same kind of marked presentation.
Another option, besides the PPP model is the Test-Teach-Test approach (TTT),
where the students, using their own language at first, complete a task without
getting any help from the teacher (a role play, for example). The next step, which is
based on the issues arisen, the teacher arranges and presents some of the lexical
or grammatical problems in the target language. This stage of the lesson is based
on the results of the first test. During the last stage of the lesson, the students do
the previous task, or a new one in order to practice the new language.
Disadvantages of Test-Teach-Test (TTT) approach:
Test-Teach-Test (TTT) is uneconomical of time if the learners are not able to
communicate in English when discussing the grammar points. Learners must have
a basic knowledge of grammar terminology. Some learners may not believe their
classmates’ explanations and they may react in a negative way.
In the absence of context, sentences used in the task may have no meaning for
students which makes further discussion hard to comprehend and very theoretical.
Another model of teaching organization is Engage, Study, Activate (ESA). ESA
(Harmer, 1994) is a model based on surveys which have shown that the conditions
for successful language learning are motivation, exposure to language and
chances to use it.
In the Engage stage, the teacher tries to arouse the students’ interest, by involving
their emotions. This is achieved by using music, games, discussions, stimulating
pictures, dramatic stories, anecdotes etc. Other ways of encouraging the students
are: asking them what they think about a topic before asking them to read about it
(predicting, guessing etc.). When students are “engaged”, they learn better than
when they are partly or wholly disengaged.
Study is the stage of a lesson in which students are asked to focus on language
and its functions, or on information. Successful learning language in a classroom
depends on a logical combination of subconscious language acquisition (for
example, getting language knowledge or skills through listening and reading) and
study activities conducted by the teacher.
Activate is the stage when students are led to use the language as freely and
communicatively as they can. They are supposed to use all the language
knowledge that they have which is appropriate for a given situation or topic.
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