Penny Ur

BIO

Penny Ur has thirty-five years’ experience as an English teacher in elementary, middle and high schools in Israel. Now retired, she has taught B.A. and M.A. courses at Oranim Academic College of Education and Haifa University.  She has lectured and published extensively on topics connected to the theory and practice of effective language teaching. She was for ten years the Series Editor of the Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers series. Her books include Grammar practice activities (2nd Edition) (2009), Vocabulary activities (2012), A course in English language teaching (2012), Discussions and more (2014), all published by Cambridge University Press.

ABSTRACT

Rethinking Presentation-practice-production in the post-method era

In many classrooms and coursebooks new grammatical features – and other language items as well –are commonly taught by the process of teacher presentation, followed by learner practice, and culminating in use of the feature by the students in their own production. The use of the PPP sequence has been severely criticized by proponents of a communicative approach. However, in this post-method era we may abandon the need to obey dictates of a particular approach or method, and instead simply take our students’ learning as our main priority and select or create the combination of language-teaching techniques that we believe will best achieve this goal. Within such a combination, PPP can probably make a substantial contribution. In this presentation I will suggest how, and when, it can be most effectively used.

Rethinking Presentation-practice-production in the post-method era

Penny Ur Plenary Summary

In her presentation, Penny Ur, who has taught English in elementary, middle and high schools; lectured B.A. and M.A. courses at universities; and published extensively on topics connected to the theory and practice of effective language teaching in her thirty-five years’ experience, focused on what language-teaching method is in ELT and briefed the participants about some samples such as grammar-translation, audio-lingualism, and task-based instruction. She pointed out the problems with the concept of method as the method itself may not fit the local context; disempower the teacher; lead to the rejection of useful teaching / learning tools; and may even come to be seen as a goal itself. She shared a useful framework for the post-method era where the replacement of a set of procedures by a set of ‘macro-strategies’ (Kumaravadivelu, 1994) and a move towards the rejection of particular methods may result in limitations similar to those of methods. She reminded the audience about the idea that there is one ‘right’ or ‘best’ method of language teaching is unacceptable and suggested a ‘situated methodology’ appropriate to the context where the teacher decides what procedures to use in a teaching situation. Penny Ur also shared some information on PPP: Presentation, Practice, Production and pointed out its parallelism with skill theory where the stages match as presentation-declarative, practice-proceduralization, and production-automatization to emphasize the important transition from practice to production where the focus on meaning is necessary for a smooth continuum. She concluded her presentation by reminding the audience that in a post-method era, teachers should not have to adopt a particular method, but should feel free to select those procedures that in their view and particular context help their students to learn well; and that PPP is an example of a useful sequence of procedures that is likely to promote learning in most teaching situations.