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PPP Technique in TEFL

Presentation, practice and production.

The PPP technique in teaching is a common way to introduce students to new words and concepts. This can be especially useful in the EFL classroom. The PPP method in English teaching is a three-step lesson plan and teaching approach that helps the student learn, understand and practice new vocabulary.

The three stages of a PPP lesson 

There are three stages in a PPP TEFL lesson.

Firstly, the teacher presents the new word, an event which involves the presentation of pronunciation and spelling in context.

Next, the teacher allows the students to practice the new word in a controlled setting, making sure the student has understood the vocabulary and usage properly.

Lastly comes the production stage, where there is a period of less-controlled practice and an informal assessment of learning. This is where the students get chance to use the new word or phrase in an original way and to relate it to their knowledge and experiences.

These three stages of a PPP lesson help the student to consolidate the new word in their mental vocabulary bank.

The sequence of a PPP lesson in EFL teaching

This EFL teaching method of presentation, practice and production is an approach that follows a definite sequence:

• The teacher presents the new vocabulary and explains the form of the language in a meaningful context.
• The students practise this new vocabulary through controlled activities such as worksheets or question and answer activities to check comprehension.
• The students use or produce what they have learned in a communicative activity such as a role-play, communication game, or question and answer session.

Teaching English using the PPP technique

Each stage of the Presentation, Practice and Production lesson must be planned well to be effective. However, the PPP method in TEFL is a highly flexible approach to teaching and there are many different activities a teacher can employ for each stage.

Presentation can include mime, drawing and audio. In fact, it is a good idea to try to engage with the students’ different senses to get across the meaning of the new word, using visual, kinaesthetic (movement) and audio techniques.

It is also important to make sure that students have understood the new word before encouraging them to practise it. It is often fun and highly effective for students to play games to practise vocabulary and to produce it.

Current debate about the PPP technique in TEFL

In recent times, there has been increasing debate surrounding the PPP method of teaching, with many critics asking if teachers should be using the PPP technique so often in the EFL classroom.

Some critics of the PPP method in TEFL think it can be too formal and structured, with too little focus on student interaction. However, we think the PPP technique in EFL teaching offers a very flexible base from which to construct a lesson that is highly student-centred.

For ideas on ways to present new vocabulary and check comprehension , and activities which allow students to practice and produce their vocabulary , please browse this PPP teaching section.

• Is the PPP method old fashioned or is it still a useful and effective way to teach?
• Do you use the PPP technique in TEFL?
• What is your favourite way to present new vocabulary?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments box below.

9 thoughts on “ PPP Technique in TEFL ”

may I know who is the actual founder of PPP technique?

Sorry Sifa, we don’t know who originally developed the PPP technique. Can any readers help?

Yes, it was Jeremy Harmer. 😉

Thanks for this information, Miri! If any readers want to check out Jeremy Harmer’s explorations of the PPP technique, you can read more in his book: ‘How to Teach English’, published by Longman.

Catherine may you please help me with the same book by Jeremy Harmer, on soft copy I will highly appreciate it.

Hi Grace, Jeremy Harmer’s book can be found online to read or download at academia.edu.

It PPP useful and used in teaching reading?

Hi Muharram, thanks for your question. Yes the PPP method can be used to teach all areas of language, including reading.

In this type of lesson, any new target words would be presented in the early part of the class (pre-reading) before the student meets the vocabulary within a longer written text. While reading the text during the ‘practice’ stage, students should be able to identify the individual ideas expressed and understand how the new words are used in context.

After reading, students can analyse the material and discuss the text, hold a questions/answer session or write about it in the production stage. This helps them deepen their understanding and test their reading comprehension. I hope this gives you a few ideas – I’ll be adding more details about using the PPP method to teach reading and writing soon.

Can somebody help me with these questions of Unit 3 i-to-i (180 hour units) please:

Match the description to the stages to make a complete PPP lesson. The aim of the lesson is expressing past habits with ‘used to’ + infinitive. For example, When I was younger, I used to watch cartoons.

The teacher repeats the model sentence with natural linking, stress and intonation. The class repeats.

1)Teacher asks, “Did he play football in the past?” (Yes) “Does he play football now?” (No).

2)Teacher says ‘used to’ + infinitive can be used to talk about things we regularly did in the past, but don’t do now.

3)The students answer conversation questions about their childhood to introduce them to the topic.

4)The teacher asks some individuals how many people share their thoughts on living in London and corrects some errors if they are made.

5)The learners use the target language to talk about how their lives are different now they live in London and compare their country’s cultures to the UK.

6)The teacher writes the model sentence on the board. When I was younger, he used to play football. Draws a box round ‘used to’ and writes ‘infinitive’ over play.

7)Learners choose an activity they enjoyed as children then walk round the class asking if other people used to do the same thing. For example, Did you use to watch cartoons?

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What is ‘Presentation, Practice, Production’ (PPP)?

And how can i best use it in my classroom.

Presentation, practice, production (PPP) is a lesson structure, a way to order activities in your lessons.

Although quite old and heavily criticised over the years, PPP is probably the most commonly used lesson structure in teaching English to foreign learners today. It’s also still widely taught to new teachers and seen on initial teacher training courses like the CELTA and CertTESOL.

Most course books that you’re likely to use will structure their chapters in ways similar or the same as PPP, meaning that you’ll get a lot of exposure to this method.

As the name suggests, there are three stages to this lesson structure, which we’ll look at now.

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The ‘presentation’ stage

This is where the language is introduced, or ‘presented’ to the learners, usually by introducing a context or situation. For example, you could:

Tell or act out a short story or anecdote ( “I woke up this morning with a nasty cold… AHHH-CHOOO! I went to the doctor and…”)

Play a short audio clip

Show a clip from a movie or TV show.

Show objects you’ve brought in (e.g. newspaper cuttings, plane tickets, hobby materials)

The aim is to ensure students understand the context and get them thinking about it. You could elicit ideas or suggestions from students, get them to talk to each other about what they know or think about the situation, etc. This also helps them start to remember the language and vocabulary they already know about the topic (or ‘activate the schemata’, if you want the fancy term for it).

The ‘practice’ stage

The ‘practice’ stage is when students use the language in a controlled way. This stage is sometimes divided into two — a controlled practice and a freer practice. Again, among many things, you could get students to:

Drill sentences or sounds, chorally or individually.

Substitution drill in pairs

Sentence matching activities

Gap-fill exercises

Pair work asking and answering questions

The aim of this stage is accuracy . Error correction is important in this stage, so monitor the students closely and take time to correct errors immediately. A delayed error correction section after the activity would be useful for target language errors that seem to be common.

The ‘production’ stage

The ‘production’ stage is where the language is used more openly. Things like:

Communication tasks

Collaborative tasks

Discussion activities

The focus of this stage is using the language as fluently and naturally as possible , as students would do outside of the classroom.

Theory behind Presentation, Practice, Production

This is where PPP gets criticised. It started in the 1960s, and language learning theory has developed considerably since then. Academics who study second language acquisition get annoyed at how PPP doesn’t tick any of the boxes for how we’re supposed to learn a language and yet is still so widespread.

Some learning assumptions behind presentation, practice, production are:

Students should be told the grammar rules and then practice them (a deductive approach).

Language learning is a skill like any other and should be practised as such.

There should be a high level of teacher control, slowly handed over to learners as the lesson progresses.

Language is a series of items that can be learned in sequence.

The target language should be practised by removing unnecessary language to help focus.

All of these have been shown that this isn’t how we best learn languages (in fact, the opposite is largely true!).

However, it isn’t all bad. Here’s my opinion on the advantages and disadvantages of PPP:

It’s easy to learn for new teachers.

It’s very flexible.

It’s easy to plan for and has a logical progression.

It works for most types of classes, including larger classes.

Most course books use this or a similar method to structure their lessons and chapters.

Disadvantages

Research shows that it may not be the best way to teach/learn a language.

Weaker learners may overuse the target language from the practice session, so it sounds unnatural.

Learners may not know how to use the target language in different contexts.

It can be boring if used repeatedly for higher-level students.

Thoughts on Presentation, Practice, Production

Academics are often far removed from the classroom and the real world, studying the individual phenomenon in isolation.

I’ve often seen a light bulb moment for students whilst teaching PPP (although one could argue that it’s not strict PPP, and it’d be hard to isolate the teaching method from other variables). Teaching over a period of time with this method, you do see students improve. Consider also that it’s not done in isolation — you should be getting your learners to interact in English naturally and read extensively outside of class, for starters.

Presentation, practice, production works. Maybe not as well as something like task-based learning (TBL), but TBL takes longer to plan and implement, which becomes very difficult when your teaching hours are high.

Sure, so it might not be theoretically perfect, but it does work.

How to adapt the PPP method

Also, I believe it has evolved from the ‘traditional’ PPP approach described above. Here are some ways you can adapt the classic PPP structure:

Spend more time in the presentation stage eliciting.

Turn the deductive aspect of explicit grammar instruction into an inductive aspect (so learners have to figure out the patterns themselves).

Add collaborative tasks during the practice stage, which learners must use the target language to complete successfully.

Include meta-learning strategies so students can learn how to learn.

Include more incidental language throughout the class so learners hear language in a more natural context.

Change the final stage into a task, such as you’d find in task-based learning .

These changes turn PPP into something else, a blended approach that addresses many of the criticisms of PPP.

Other structures have sought to improve upon the model of PPP. Variants include ESA (engage, study, activate) and CAP (context, analysis, practice)

However, the simplicity of PPP and its notoriety have kept it the most widely used model. I doubt it’s going away any time soon.

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TEFL Masterclass: how to structure brilliant PPP lessons

Tom garside.

When planning to teach a language item, how can you ensure that your learners are getting what they need at key points in the lesson? The way in which teaching and learning activity, tasks and activities are ordered can go a long way to helping students to achieve within the limited time they have and with the content you are teaching. The  PPP  lesson staging technique is well-known and has become a standard of the  ESOL  classroom , but teachers do not always include the  micro-stages  and routines which really make PPP work in a purposeful way. The three stages of a PPP lesson  (Present – Practice – Produce)  are useful for lessons focusing on a language system ( grammar ,  vocabulary  or  pronunciation ). This structure is useful for introducing a language point to learners with very little experience of the item, and guides them towards independent production of the language they are learning in a scaffolded way. The three main stages of the lesson are:

Presentation – Elicitation, drilling and concept checking

Presentation , where the teacher  elicits, drills  and  checks  key aspects of meaning and use, provides a comprehensive first appreciation of the language being taught. In an effective presentation stage, the teacher should introduce new language by focusing on meaning before form. This means eliciting the target language through visual aids, gestures or video along with simple questions which do not contain the form being taught, but build up to its meaning. This takes some planning, but by fixing the concept of the language independently of the form itself, you can ensure that students have a correct understanding of exactly what it means (and doesn’t mean), before making contact with the language itself. For example, when introducing the past continuous tense, you could show a picture of a street scene where lots of things are happening, and elicit the form by saying: “this is what I saw out of my window yesterday morning. Tell me about what I saw”. The natural answer to this prompt is “some people were walking / a man was waiting for a bus, etc.”. If this is a relatively new piece of grammar for the learners, the question “what were these people doing yesterday morning?” is not a good question – if that is the grammar you are teaching, then you are assuming that the learners do not fully understand it (otherwise why are you teaching it?). By using the language you are teaching to elicit the same language, you are setting the learners up for failure from their very first contact with the form. This is simply unfair and will lead to problems later on. Presentation of new language should also focus on  pronunciation , after all, you want your students to use the new form, so it is worth highlighting how to say it.  Drilling  is an effective way to achieve this, but drilling is often not well thought through by language teachers. Be aware that fixing correct pronunciation in every member of the class takes more than simply calling out the word and asking the whole class to repeat after you. How can you hear individual problems among a chorus of 30 voices all speaking together? Ask the whole class to repeat after you at first, to give everyone the confidence that comes with trying a new word out in a group, then call on small groups or pairs of students to say the form, then focus on individuals who may need support. Correct any mispronunciations now, and students will focus more on the spoken form later in the lesson. When (and only when) you are happy that students are producing mostly correct forms, turn to the written form of the language you are teaching. Focusing on spelling too early can cause problems with pronunciation, as irregular spellings and contractions can be mispronounced easily, so save your whiteboard display of the form until after a good drilling session. Where possible, write a marker sentence which contains the word or grammar you are teaching to show the form in context, and you can demonstrate usage points at the same time. Finally, an important and often forgotten part of language presentation is  concept checking . Refer students to the form that you want to check, and ask a series of very simple yes-or-no questions to isolate the correct meaning of what you have taught. This confirms how strongly your learners have taken on the meaning of the word, and allows them to demonstrate their comprehension in a simple way. This is important for you, as you need to know what they have and haven’t picked up, to inform how you deal with later tasks in the lesson. Going back to the past continuous tense,  concept checking questions (CCQs)  could include “is the action happening in the past?”, “Did you see the people start the actions?”, “Did you see the people finish the actions?”. The three answers to these questions (Yes, no and no) will show you that students have correctly understood the concept behind the past continuous. Presentation is probably the most detailed and procedural stage of a PPP lesson, and should take about a quarter of your lesson time. Once you have checked student understanding, they are ready to move on to some tasks to get working with the language.

Practice tasks and feedback

Effective language practice does not simply mean getting the students using the language they are learning; it should include restricted elements of use to focus on specific aspects of meaning and form. Restricted practice tasks should prompt students to make choices about what language they use to answer questions. Common question types are gapfill, sentence completion and matching sentence halves, or words and pictures. At this point in the lesson, students should be thinking “is this the correct form, or that one?”, then deciding on an answer based on information which appears in the sentence example, or in the task itself. Writing complete sentences, or using the new form freely is too much too soon at this point, as learners will typically need some support early on in their application of new language. After you have set the task and students have finished writing their ideas, lead a session where they can suggest answers to you and the rest of the class for comment. This is the all-important post-task feedback stage. Allow time for individual students (nominated by you) to think and give a considered answer, if possible showing why they chose that word or phrase in that situation. Whether they give an accurate response or not, the confidence to speak out and share an answer deserves praise, and should be opened up to other students for comment. Be careful of stepping on a correct answer too soon and confirming it –  too much teacher input  here will switch students off to other possible answers, and they will end up listening to you rather than each other, which shuts down the possibility for discussion or peer correction, an important part of communicative language learning. Practice task feedback is where the bulk of the real learning, rethinking and confirmation of the form in use happens, so do not neglect it for the sake of a few minutes of lesson time.

Production tasks and final feedback

Once you are happy that students have mostly got their ideas straight in the restricted task, they are ready to fly a little freer without so much support from you. This is the essence of a scaffolded approach to teaching – withdrawing your support throughout the lesson to enable learners to finally apply what you are teaching in their own extended ideas. Production tasks are usually freer speaking or writing activities, where students produce language without much support from a task, to talk on a topic or write a piece to a prompt which would naturally be fulfilled by using the target form you have taught. For example, a present continuous production task could ask students to describe some of the things they saw on the way to school, or the strangest thing they have ever seen out of their bedroom window. These prompts use the same basic concept as your elicitation prompts from the presentation stage, but personalised so that students can really talk about their own experiences. Be aware that students often need to be reminded of the key aspects of meaning that you ran through before (remember, describe things that you did not see the beginning or end of, but things you saw going on as you looked…). A really focused production task (if you have time) is made possible with some brainstorming of ideas or planning of vocabulary that the learners will need for their story. Use a four-minute dictionary stage or reflective time to gather ideas, then ask students to speak or write, and usually the end result is more comprehensive and accurate. The post-task feedback stage for a final production activity is less in-depth and accuracy focused than that of a practice stage. At this point, students have demonstrated the final outcome of the lesson (unless you ask them to perform a second production stage even better than the first), so use this time to refer to some successful and unsuccessful moments that you heard in your learners’ language. Display a couple of nice examples of usage, or funny sentences that you heard, and offer some final advice on the use of the form that they have been working with. The PPP lesson structure is a ‘golden oldie’ of TESOL, but as the saying goes: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! Used well, it is a reliable and effective procedure that gives you tangible outcomes to your lesson, evidenced by the staged learning that is made possible through the class time. If you'd like to discover new ways to improve your lessons, come and meet some of our teacher training team by joining one of our upcoming  professional development workshops  conducted both online and in our Hong Kong training centre.

Tom worked as EfA’s former Director of Teacher Training, and has over 18 years of teaching and training experience in Europe, New Zealand and China. He holds a degree in Linguistics and French, Cambridge CELTA and DELTA qualifications, a Post-Graduate Diploma in TESOL and an MATESOL. He previously trained teachers in Europe as part of the European Union Comenius teacher development project where he provided initial training for the Trinity CertTESOL and in-service training for native and non-native-speaker teachers in a wide range of teaching situations. He is the author of Tesol: A Gateway Guide for Teachers of English.

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PPP TEFL Teaching Methodology

What is presentation, practice and production (ppp).

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.

Advantages of the PPP (3Ps) Method

As with any well-established methodology, PPP has its critics and a couple of relatively new methodologies are starting to gain in popularity such as  TBL (task based learning)  and  ESA (engage, study, activate) . However, even strong advocates of these new methodologies do concede that new EFL (English as a foreign language) teachers find the PPP methodology easiest to grasp, and that these new teachers, once familiar with the PPP methodology, are able to use TBL and ESA more effectively than new trainees that are only exposed to either TBL or ESA.

Indeed, there are strong arguments to suggest that experienced teachers trained in PPP use many aspects of TBL and ESA in their lessons, and that these new methodologies are in truth, the PPP methodology with some minor adjustments.

At this stage you might well be asking, It’s all very well having a clear methodology for how to teach but how do I know what to teach? The language that we call English today has absorbed a great many influences over the last thousand years or so. It has resulted in it becoming a language that can provide us with a sparklingly witty pop culture reference from a Tarantino script, 4 simple words spoken by Dr. Martin Luther King that continue to inspire us today, and something as simple and mundane as a road traffic sign.

The Job of the EFL Teacher

As EFL teachers our job is to break down this rich and complex language into manageable chunks for our students. These chunks of language are what EFL teachers call target languageWe are going to look at an example of what a piece of target language might be and then you will be given more detail on how this would be taught in a PPP lesson before finally watching three videos with some key aspects of each stage of the lesson highlighted for you.

During the course we will spend a great deal of time in the training room equipping you with the tools to employ a successful methodology for teaching the English language. You are going to get opportunities to both hone these skills in the training room and put them into practice in authentic classroom settings.

Of course you might be thinking, I don’t have any experience of being in a classroom! How on earth am I going to cope with standing at the front of a class with 20 plus pairs of eyes looking at me waiting to see what I do?

All good TEFL courses are designed to train those with no teaching experience whatsoever. We will spend the first part of the course in the training room making you familiar with all the new skills you will need whilst giving you opportunities to practice them in a supported and controlled environment.

Only after that, will you be put in an authentic classroom environment. It goes without saying that the first time anybody stands up and delivers their first lesson will be a nerve-racking experience. However, it is also an experience that mellows over time, and one that all teachers remember fondly as time goes by and they feel more at home in a classroom.

There will be some of you out there with experience of teaching in a classroom already. You may be well versed in employing many different methodologies and strategies in your classroom already, but many or most will have been with native English speaking students, or those with a near-native levels of English. This means that some of the skills we will be equipping you with may feel a little alien at first, but your experience will not prove to be a hindrance. Indeed, you will already have successful classroom management skills that can be adapted to fit a second language classroom fairly easily and other trainees on the course will benefit from your presence.

In addition, some of the skills that you will learn on the course can also be adapted to work in a classroom of native speakers too, and it is not unusual for experienced teachers to comment on exactly this after completing a good TEFL course.

Target Language in an EFL Lesson

Recall how it is the job of the EFL teacher to break down the rich tapestry of the English language into manageable bite-size chunks, suitable for study in an average study period of 50 minutes. As mentioned, we refer to these chunks as target language. As EFL teachers we will select target language that is appropriate for both the skill level and the age of the students.

The target language that you will see being presented in the videos is Likes and dislikes for 6 food items.

The teacher you will watch in the video has a clear aim, which is to ensure that:

**By the end of the lesson, students will know the names of 6 food items in English and will be able to express whether or not they like them in a spoken form by entering into a simple dialogue consisting of,

• Do you like ___?,
• Yes, I like ___., or
• No, I don’t like ___.

The six food items are ___. In short, the students will be able to name the 6 food items by the end of the lesson and tell whether they like them or not.**

Presentation – Part 1 of PPP

You may have delivered a few presentations in your time but the type of presentation we deliver in a second language classroom will differ quite a bit from those. For a start, you were speaking to proficient users of the English language about something they were, most likely, vaguely familiar with anyway. In an EFL classroom we don’t have those luxuries, so we have to be careful about the language we use and how clearly we present the new language that we wish for our students to acquire.

Let’s look at 4 key things that should be occurring in an effective second language classroom presentation:

1 – Attention in the Classroom

Learners are alert, have focused their attention on the new language and are responsive to cues that show them that something new is coming up. A simple way to ensure some of the above is if the teacher makes the target language interesting to the students.

The language will of course, be of more interest to the students if it is put into some type of context that the students are familiar with. In the case of likes and dislikes for young learners a visual associated with a facial expression will be something they can relate to. Naturally, the easier it is for them to relate to the context, the more likely they are to be interested in the language presented.

In the case of the target language for the videos a smiley face visual and a sad face visual on the whiteboard linked to the phrases I like ___. and I don’t like ___., respectively. A teacher might make exaggerated facial expressions whilst presenting these ideas to make the ideas both fun and easy to perceive for the students. This is often referred to as contextualization in EFL classrooms.

2 – Perception and Grading of Language

We want to ensure that the learners both see and hear the target language easily. So if a whiteboard is being used, it should be well organized with different colors being used to differentiate between different ideas. If images are being used, there should be no ambiguity as to what they represent and sounds made by the teacher should not only be clear, but should be repeated and the teacher needs to check the material has been perceived correctly, and can do this by asking the students to repeat the sounds he or she is making.

Learners will be bombarded with a series of images corresponding to sounds made by the teacher during the presentation stage and it is the teacher’s responsibility to ensure that they are not overloaded with information and that clear links are being made between the images and the associated sounds.

Therefore, there is an onus on the teacher not to use any unnecessary language at this stage. That is to say the grading of their language should be appropriate for the level of their students and the language they use should consist of the target language and any other essential language required to present the ideas clearly such as commands like listen! The commands should, whenever possible, be supported by clear body language.

3 – Target Language Understanding

The learners must be able to understand the meaning of the material. So in the case of likes and dislikes they perhaps need to see an image of a happy face and associate it with liking something and a sad face and associate that with disliking something.

We also need to have a way of checking if the learners did indeed, understand the material presented without asking the question, Do you understand? as this invariably triggers the response yes! from learners who are keen to please their teacher and not to lose face. We, as teachers, need to be a little more imaginative in checking our student’s understanding of material presented. Ideally, we should be checking the learners’ understanding in context. In the videos you will see, expect to see the teacher doing this during the presentation stage.

4 – Short-term Memory in the Classroom

The learners will have to retain the information from the presentation and use it further on in the lesson when we have consolidated their learning of the material and we will give them an opportunity to produce it on their own.

For the target language to be retained by the learners, it needs to be engaging and we need to consider that different learners will remember the material in different ways. Some by the way the material is seen, others by the way it is heard, and others if it is associated with a physical movement perhaps. We need to make sure our presentation has something to enable all these types of learners to retain the information.

Presentation Stage of a PPP EFL Lesson with subtitles

Practice – Part 2 of PPP

Practice can roughly be defined as the rehearsal of certain behaviors with the objective of consolidating learning and improving performance. Below are some of the characteristics of an effective language practice:

1 – Practice Validity

The practice activity must have learners rehearsing the skill or material it purports to practice. So in the case of the lesson you will view shortly, it must have the learners practicing both the food vocabulary items and the structure of the dialogue, i.e.,

• Yes, I like ___, or

2 – Pre-learning

Before we ask our learners to practice new language, we must have ensured that they have some understanding of the new language. We will have done this during the presentation stage. If they have not had the new language clearly presented to them and been aided in being given some understanding of it, then they (the learners) will not be practicing at this stage but will be going through another initial learning stage. Worse still, they will feel like they are being tested on something they haven’t been allowed to gain an understanding of.

3 – Volume (Amount) of Practice

Here, we are referring to the number of opportunities every student in the class has to practice the new language and not the level of sound. The more opportunities each student has to practice the target language, the more effective this stage of the lesson is.

So in the case of likes and dislikes, we might give the students individual worksheets where they have to fill in some part of the dialogue and the name of a food.

4 – Success Orientation

The students should have an opportunity to practice the new language and in order for this to happen they need an activity that both stretches them and is a task they can complete because of course, if it wasn’t, they wouldn’t be getting any opportunity to practice.

5 – Issuing Activity Instructions and Managing the Activity

Of course, whilst it is important to select an appropriate activity, it is equally important to issue clear and unambiguous instructions for the activity itself so all of your students are clear as to what is expected of them. We will be issuing instructions for the activity in the student’s second language so we need to make use of clear visuals to support any language we have to use and strong demonstrations of what is expected.

Managing the activity should consist of the teacher being mobile during the activity, offering praise and being on hand to show struggling students where relevant information may be found on the whiteboard.

Practice Stage of PPP EFL Lesson with subtitles

Production – Part 3 of PPP

The students have now had the target language presented to them clearly and have had an opportunity to practice it in a controlled environment. If we return to the swimming instructor analogy, it is now time to let them take their first few tentative strokes in the pool on their own with supervision and encouragement from the instructor.

As with the practice stage, we have to initiate an activity that allows them opportunities to use the target language in the classroom. In fact, the characteristics of a production stage activity are quite similar to the practice stage with one key difference and that is, student autonomy.

During this stage, the students will be producing the target language with minimal assistance from the teacher as opposed to the practice stage where the teacher will be on hand to assist students rehearse target language that has only just been presented to them.

Here are some of the key aspects of a production stage activity:

1 – Volume (Amount) of Production

As with practice, we want to create as many opportunities for our students to produce the target language albeit this time, more independently. This means we avoid activities where the students speak to the teacher as this allows limited opportunities (the students have to wait their turn before they get a chance to speak to the teacher). Instead for spoken activities, we look to get the students speaking in pairs, speaking to each other as much as possible, whilst we as the teachers go around the classroom offering minimal assistance but lots of positive reinforcement.

2 – Production Validity

Again, we should initiate an activity that allows the students to produce the target language that we presented to them and not a variation on it (although this is not strictly true with higher level students).

So, in the case of likes and dislikes for food, we should set up an activity where the students are saying, Do you like pineapple? as opposed to, What do you think of pineapples?

3 – Production Contextualization

The activity should simulate a real–life situation where they (the students) may use the target language. In the case of likes and dislikes for food this might be a menu with images of the food items or perhaps a series of images of the food items to prompt the dialogue,

• Yes, I like ____, or

Note that a successful production activity will also have aspects that set it apart from a practice activity, including:

4 – Student Autonomy

Students will be speaking, using the target language, with ideally, little or no support from the teacher.

They shouldn’t be looking things up on either the whiteboard or on any materials they have on their desk (e.g. a completed practice worksheet) so a teacher may choose to erase information from the whiteboard for this stage and the teacher might also choose to get students to clear their desks.

5 – Issuing Instructions for an Activity

As with the practice stage whilst it is important to select an appropriate activity, it is equally important to issue clear and unambiguous instructions for the activity itself so all of our students are clear as to what is expected of them. We will be issuing instructions for the activity in the student’s second language so we need to make use of clear visuals to support any language we have to use and strong demonstrations of what is expected, just as we will have done during the practice stage.

6 – Correcting Errors During the Activity

It is important that the students get as many opportunities to speak using the newly acquired language. Therefore, a teacher shouldn’t be drowning them out by speaking at length, over the top of them to correct any errors. This obviously differs from the practice where students expect the teacher to assist them as they rehearse (not produce) newly acquired language.

Clever use of body language by the teacher will enable them to be discrete in correcting errors and will allow them to offer much needed encouragement to students as well.

Production Stage of a PPP EFL Lesson with subtitles

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How to plan a tefl lesson.

What is a TEFL lesson plan and what should it include? A step by step guide to planning lessons for English language teaching.

Why plan lessons?

Every TEFL lesson needs a plan. The level of detail it contains, and whether it is mainly in your head or mainly on paper, will vary depending on your training and experience, the type of class (one-to-one classes often have a much more fluid plan, for example) and the time that you have available to plan.

The main reason to have a plan for a TEFL lesson is to know, firstly, the aim of your lesson and, secondly, what you’re going to do during the lesson in order to achieve that aim. If you don’t know what you want your students to be able to do by the end of the lesson, you risk them going away feeling that they haven’t achieved anything.

What should a TEFL lesson plan include?

Everything that you might want to include in your plan derives from the main aim and how you’re going to achieve it. What materials do you need for the activities that you’ve planned in order to achieve your aim? How long will each of these activities take? What problems might your students have in dealing with a particular activity or language point? And so on.

As we said, for most teachers it is impractical to plan every lesson with this amount of detail. But these kinds of detail should at the very least be in your head, even if the paper version is just a few scribbled lines – and writing a few plans in this way is the best way to get yourself into the habit of thinking about these kinds of detail when you’re planning, even if you don’t have the time to actually write them.

Although there are other possibilities, here’s a list of the main things to include in a detailed lesson plan:

Main aim Subsidiary aims Personal aims Materials Anticipated problems and solutions

And for each stage of the lesson itself:

Timing Stage aims Activities Focus

We’ll have a look at each one more closely. At the end is an example plan for this Used to lesson .

What should the main aim be? Ideally it should come from a course plan which outlines a logical progression of aims for every lesson in a course. How does this lesson that you’re teaching today fit into the bigger picture of what your students want or need to achieve on the course? The aim might be based on a language point (grammatical, lexical or phonological), or it might be based on a skill (reading, writing, listening or speaking).

The key is to think not in terms of what you want to teach, but in terms of what you want your students to be able to do . By thinking from your students’ perspective you are more likely to choose activities which will help them achieve this aim, rather than activities which are easy for you to teach. If your aim is grammar or vocabulary based, you also avoid the risk of “teaching” the form and then thinking “okay, they’ve got it, job done”.

So, instead of “to teach will and going to” or “to practice listing for gist” try “to enable students to discuss future plans using will and going to” or “to develop students’ ability to identify the main ideas in a reading text”. Think along the lines of “ to help / to enable / to develop/ to improve… ” rather than “to teach / to practice”.

It’s also a good idea to make a note of how you will recognise when your students have achieved the main aim. This can help you afterwards to critically analyse your lesson, think about ways to improve it if they didn’t achieve the aim, and decide what further work is needed on a particular language point or skill.

Subsidiary aims

You may also have some secondary aims that you would like to work on. In the “Used to” lesson below the main aim is based on a language point, but we do some listening work to provide the context for presenting this language, so we take the opportunity to develop the students’ listening skills. We also introduce some vocabulary, not just because we need it to understand the text, but because we would like our students to be able to use this vocabulary outside the lesson.

Personal aims

You might also have something that you want to achieve on a more personal level. Maybe in your last lesson you weren’t happy with your board work and you want to improve on this. If there are several aspects of your teaching that you want to improve or develop, try focusing on one at a time here – work on it for a few lessons until you’re happy with it, then move on to the next one.

What materials will you need for each of your activities? Make sure you won’t need to run back to the photocopier during the class by going through all the stages of your lesson one by one – have you forgotten anything?

Anticipated problems and solutions

Take a little time to go through the stages of your lesson and anticipate the problems your students may have and what you will do if these problems crop up. Anticipating the unexpected allows you to, as far as is possible, avoid the danger of being left stranded without an answer. This can help you feel more confident and deliver a more effective lesson.

Think in terms of vocabulary in a text that you may have to pre-teach in some way, potential issues with pronunciation and how you’re going to deal with them, possible lack of student imagination in creative tasks, possible confusion of tenses and how you’re going to resolve this, and so on. It’s important to be precise here. If you say “students may be unfamiliar with some words in the text” it doesn’t really help you to prepare a solution. If you say “students may be unfamiliar with the words “to give up, to quit…”, you can think about the best way to present or elicit the meaning of each.

Stages of the lesson

Now we come to the lesson itself. There are four things to consider here:

Your lesson has a fixed length and so you’ll need to think about the timing of each activity. This helps you to know that you have planned a long enough lesson, and during the lesson itself will serve as a self-check to make sure you achieve what you want to achieve. If you find that you haven’t planned enough material, make sure any new activities you add contribute to your lesson aim – avoid the temptation to crow-bar in activities that don’t really fit. You could also go back and think about the activities you already have – could you expand on them or change them in any way?

These are the aims of the individual stages of your lesson, as opposed to the main aim of the lesson as a whole. There should be a logical progression here towards achieving the main aim. Stage aims should answer the question “Why am I doing this?” rather than “What am I doing?” – the answer to this second question comes in the next column.

The stages that you include in your lesson will depend, of course, on the type of lesson. The “Used to” lesson follows a traditional PPP (presentation, practice, production) model. We therefore expect to see a stage where the language is presented in some way. This could be a situational presentation, a presentation from a text, or one of a number of different techniques to present new language. We also expect to see some practice stages, probably some restricted followed by some freer practice. These stages could be either oral or written. Finally, we expect to see a production stage or, as we have called it in this lesson, authentic practice.

This is what you actually do at each stage of the lesson. Be specific here. Instead of “Look at and discuss pictures”, break it down and say exactly how you’re going to do this: “Students look at photos of children doing things; Students discuss in pairs whether or not they did these things in the past and whether or not they do them now”. Being this specific will help keep you on track and ensure that you don’t forget a crucial part of an activity.

This tells you whether the activity is pair-work (S-S), group work (S-S-S), a teacher-led activity (during the presentation stage, for example – T-Ss) and so on. This can show you whether or not you have a range of different activity types – is your lesson too teacher-centred? Is every activity pairwork? Have you mixed up the groups for different activities? Here’s the used to lesson plan:

This lesson follows a typical PPP (Presentation, Practice, Production) model. With this model we first present or elicit the language in some way. The students then practise it in more or less controlled situations and finally produce it in a more authentic situation. Have a look below for more about these practice and production stages.

PPP is just one of several possible lesson models – as such we have not covered all of the possible lesson stage types and have only touched on some of the terminology that you might include in these stages. But we’ll expand on some of the terminology and stages that we have mentioned in more detail here:

A lead in activity is designed to “warm the students up” – to generate interest and get them thinking about the topic. When you introduce a topic, for example with pictures, a video or some questions, you activate in your students’ minds a mental image or expectation based on their existing knowledge of the topic. This mental image is often called a schema , and so we can say that the aim of a lead-in stage is to “activate your students’ schemata”. Your students’ existing knowledge and experience can then be used to personalise the lesson.

Target language

The aim of the presentation stage is to present or elicit the target language – the language that we want the students to be able to use correctly in order to achieve the aim of our lesson. There are different ways to do this – in this case the teacher elicits the meaning of the target language with a series of concept questions before giving the target sentence itself.

Manipulating form

By this we mean that the teacher presents (or elicits) the question and negative forms of the target language, as well as, perhaps, other examples in the first, second or third person.

Restricted/controlled practice

The first practice stage, where the teacher drills the pronunciation of the target language, is very restricted, in the sense that students focus entirely on the sentence containing the target language. There is no opportunity at this stage to incorporate other language. The practice stage of PPP lessons tends to start with restricted practice in this way, and then gradually move on to less restricted and eventually much more authentic practice.

In the less restricted practice stage of this lesson, students are given the chance to circulate and ask each other questions (using the material that was gathered during the lead in). The focus is still very much on the target language, but much less restricted or controlled than the previous exercise.

Authentic/Free/Fluency practice

Finally, the students are given the opportunity to produce the target language in a much freer context. The activity in this lesson encourages them to talk about the past, and they may naturally use the target language during their conversations, but they are also free to use other language. There shouldn’t be any pressure on the students at this stage to use the target language, and you may find that they don’t use it very much at all. This is why we can call this stage authentic practice – in an authentic situation we wouldn’t use “used to” in every sentence when communicating with someone – we would maybe use it once or twice in addition to other forms.

Keith Taylor

Keith is the co-founder of Eslbase and School of TEFL . He's been a teacher and teacher trainer for over 20 years, in Indonesia, Australia, Morocco, Spain, Italy, Poland, France and now in the UK.

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41 comments

Gordon Ross

Thank you for this. I am currently studying to be a TEFL teacher, and I’m glad I have found your website. The information you are sharing is very clear and well explained.

Yasmine Almokhtar

It’s well organized and so helpful, thank you so much for this clarification

Maisaa Dahdal

Very useful. Many thanks.

That was clear and well explained. Thank you

Patrick Serge MONGBO

So happy to have these cues on lesson planning. Very simple understandable and useful for teachers especially beginners. Pat Serge tefl Inspector

Spastic-Tactician

I love the emphasis on thematic connection between lesson stages. I train public school teachers in Japan and the most important thing I do for them is to help them begin to plan the connections in their lessons, their units, and their terms. Student motivation is a fragile thing. Creating and maintaining engaging thematic connections that carry through every stage, every activity, each one informing the next and building on the previous is absolutely crucial to supporting that motivation. Textbooks don’t provide this kind of goal-focused thematic connection. It can only come from the dedicated preparation of the teacher. Your section about the importance of putting the work in before lessons is, as such, a super important part of this article. One suggestion: I am not a fan of calling the final stage “production”. Production is a word that carries a machine-like, robotic connotation and… alarmingly, that is exactly what I often see in the final stages of lessons I observe. Students robotically spitting out what they think they should say. I prefer calling the final stage “Use” (My preferred acronym is SPU, Show, Practice, Use). When we think in terms of having students actually USE language or communicative strategies, rather than simply producing them, we sharpen our aim when choosing or designing activities. This subtle change in thinking can help us think about language as a communicative device rather than as a barrier to overcome for students, and THAT is key.

How can we check the effectiveness of the presentation stage, how can we take student feedback?

Checking understanding of the language as you present it is very important. In this lesson it is done with concept checking questions, in this part of the plan:

“Did he smoke in the past? Yes- Once or many times? Many times- Does he smoke now? No “He used to smoke T repeats with other examples”

You can see some more detail about this in this post about the lesson: https://www.eslbase.com/teaching/used-to-lesson-plan

…and in this post about concept checking questions: https://www.eslbase.com/tefl-a-z/concept-questions

Hope that helps.

James Tringle

I am just got through teaching in several public schools in Vietnam over the past year. I basically used the lesson plans from “Family and friends” to teach the classes. Oh by the way I had an average of 55+ kids in each class.

Hi Eslbase, good morning. I am doing my TEFL Training Course and I have come across your website and I find it very useful for my assignments. Thanks a bunch for this.

I am also a tefl student and and doing a lesson plan on comprehension Finding it a bit difficult. Please help. Thanks

Hi Eve, thanks for your comment, and we’re glad you find the site useful!

Good Day I am struggling with the TEFL lesson plan that i must draw up. It should have the following stages. 1. Warmer, Pre teach vocab,and reading.

Hi Cherell – can you give us some more info about the plan?

i plan to do celta and found this lesson plan extremely well planned and organised.just great….

I am a TESOL student and getting ready for my practicum lessons. I was very nervous and felt like i have all the information jumbled up in my head. But this detailed lesson plan, step by step scaffolding and checklist is perfect! Thank you!

An excellent grammar lesson plan! I’m a TEFL student, and in fact, my field is not teaching, am a translator, so please I need your help for a detailed plan: Main aim: lexis, sub aim: speaking. Thank u in advanced!

Hi, am doing am assignment on a lesson and not lesson plan. The question is what are the four stages of a lesson and their activites. Please help.

Thank you so much well explained.

Many thanks for this clear presentation of the lesson plan. Just preparing for my first TP!

Holona Chetty

Well I like to say I paid money for a TEFL course which has everything that you mentioned (for free) .Thanks for sharing!

Well explained. What about demos and language analysis, when or on what stage must it be engaged?

Abdul Rahim Chaudhary

Awesome! But it is not here to select the final stages I.e. Controlled practice and production stage. Edit it please so we could copy and past for print. Thanks

This is very helpful – good to get it from a different perspective rather than just passing the course basis – thank you

I’d say an important stage was missing – final feedback! Students want to know what they did well/badly on in the final task as well as checking that they have the ‘right’ answers in more controlled practice. Other than that, a sound lesson plan for CELTA candidates. I did CELTA over 7 years ago and would have appreciated this then :)

Thanks for pointing this out zbd – we missed off the bullet point for “Feedback” for the last two activities. I’ve added these now.

Hi , I am writing my graduation paper on ESL lesson stages and lesson time management, and , I’d point out that you did a fine job and didn’t miss anything. The PPP lesson planning paradigm doesn’t require evaluation, which is by all means required by 5E Instructional Model: engage, explore, explain, elaborate and evaluate. So, probably, that is the reason you omitted feedback, which is optional in PPP.

I am a teacher trainer and I found this guide to be a very clear resource. THANK YOU!

Thanks Kimberly for your feedback.

Hi, this is a great example of lesson plan. Would it be ok if we used in our training sessions at our school?

Hi Eduardo – please feel free to use this for your training sessions.

Jose fermin

This is a very detailed PPP lesson plan. I’m a CELTA trainee and thought it was awesome!

Thanks Jose, we’re glad you found it helpful.

Hi, this Grammar Lesson Plan is excellent. Is it possible for me to obtain a copy by email? This is the best plan I have seen for a long time.

Hi Cara, thanks for your comment! Unfortunately we’re unable to send this by email – you’re welcome to copy and paste from this page though!

Hi! Thanks for letting us copy and paste it

I am a CELTA student and I have to say that this LP is excellent and inspirational! a great reference to come back for ideas! thank you so much!

Jeremias Rui Albino

Great. This is one of the clearest PPP Lesson Plans I’ve ever seen.

Thanks Gordon, and good luck with your studies. Keith

I’m glad you found it useful!

Hi Yasmine, I’m glad you found it helpful!

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• Classroom Considerations, Teacher's Toolkit

Me: Okay, time for me to do some lesson planning for tomorrow.

Also me: *yawn*

Lesson planning is one of those unfortunate things that are a necessary evil in the English as a Foreign Language classroom. Lesson planning can be downright boring if we’re honest, but it is something that needs to be done in order to teach the best lessons we can.  The bottom line, you’re stuck with lesson planning (sorry!). But it doesn’t have to be as arduous as you think.

Let’s talk about one very common lesson plan structure which can make your lesson planning as easy as, well, PPP!

PPP in the EFL classroom

Here’s the lowdown on PPP in the EFL classroom.

If you’ve even taken one look at the course content on your TEFL course, you should be familiar with PPP. PPP stands for Presentation, Practice, and Production.  t is a very common lesson plan model that is used in English as a Foreign Language classrooms around the world.

Why is PPP so common in EFL classrooms?

PPP is not rocket science. Nor is it brain surgery. This is probably the reason it is so widely used in EFL classrooms.

Once you have understood the basics of a PPP lesson, it’s super easy to slot your activities into the lesson plan framework, thus creating a lesson plan which you know will be logical and which will flow.

A breakdown of PPP

A PPP lesson is divided into three stages: not surprisingly, Presentation, Practice and Production.

The Presentation stage is basically the beginning of the lesson.

It starts with a warmer and/or a lead-in to get the students engaged and interested in the topic (or to wake them up if your lesson is at the end of the day!).

Then the teacher presents the target language of the lesson. There are a number of ways this can be done, such as presenting the language in context, eliciting the language, or telling a personal anecdote.

The teacher then tells the students the rules of the particular language structure and explains the meaning, form, and pronunciation.

The second stage is the Practice stage .

In this stage, the learners do activities to practice the target language, which requires total accuracy. These activities are, by their very nature, the controlled practice of the language.

The final stage is the Production stage .

This is when the students do more activities, but this time they are less controlled and freer. In other words, the learners are free to use the target language in whichever way they wish in the activity set up by the teacher.

The advantages of PPP

There are many advantages to using PPP in the EFL Classroom. The obvious advantage of PPP is that it is simple and straightforward. Once you have gotten the hang of the different activities you can do in the EFL classroom, it is simply a matter of plugging them into the relevant stage and your lesson should make sense.

It also provides a structure with which to plan your lessons. As long as you are clear on your aims, it helps you to plan your lesson and imagine the different steps you need to take in order to accomplish your aims.

The disadvantages of PPP

Unfortunately, there are a few disadvantages to PPP lessons.

Firstly, it is very easy to get stuck in the PPP framework .

In other words, all your lessons end up exactly the same. Of course, many of our lessons are very similar, but it’s easy to become lazy and use the exact same activities for your lessons. PPP is good like that, in that you can be confident your lessons will be effective, but you can become complacent when it comes to interest levels. As a result, your lessons can become samey .

Another disadvantage is that many teachers place too much emphasis on the Presentation stage, believing this to be the most important stage. What happens here is that the students have no opportunity to practice the language, which is actually what we want them to do.

A PPP lesson plan example

Let’s now look at an example of a traditional PPP lesson, teaching the present perfect to Intermediate learners.

Read more: An Explanation Of The Present Perfect

Presentation

The teacher puts up a map of the world on the board. In green, she has marked countries she has been to. In blue, she has marked countries she would like to go to. She asks the students to guess what the different colours mean.

Once they have correctly guessed, she boards a few example sentences, such as

I have been to India.

I have never been to France.

Have you been to Mexico?

She then explains – while eliciting as much as possible. The teacher then focuses on meaning, form and pronunciation.

The students then complete a grammar exercise, in which they complete a gap fill. As a second practice activity, the students must decide whether a set of sentences are grammatically correct or not.

The students finally discuss in partners which countries they have been to and which they would still like to visit. The students then change partners and repeat the conversations. The teacher gets feedback from the class and does a delayed error correction activity.

Alternatives to PPP

Of course, PPP is not the only way to structure an EFL lesson plan.

There are many other frameworks that work just as well, such as ARC , TTT , and TBL . Each has its advantages and disadvantages. Which one you will use in your classroom will depend on your learners, the target language, and you.

Using PPP in the EFL classroom is a great idea for beginners.

While you are starting out as a TEFL teacher, we recommend you adopt the PPP lesson plan structure just for the simple fact that it’s logical and straightforward. When you have a bit of experience under your belt then you should definitely branch out and try your hand at a few other lesson plan structures.

But until then, go forth and Present, Practice and Produce!

The above information about PPP is very informative and helpful for the beginners like me .I would appreciate if you post more informative articles about language lessons at the initial stage. thanks a lot

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20 Presentation Tips for Your ESL Students

Helping learners to give presentations is an excellent way to encourage fluency. For some of your students, the ability to give a good presentation in English may be mandatory for their jobs. Here are twenty tips to help ensure a successful presentation, from beginning to end. Who knows? You may find them useful too.

• Allow plenty of time for preparation.
• Answer the all-important question-words: why? who? where? when? how? and what?.
• Structure your presentation into introduction, body, conclusion and questions.
• Write notes based on keywords.
• Rehearse your presentation several times and modify it as necessary.
• Select the right equipment for the job.
• Use your equipment effectively.
• Make use of clear, powerful visual aids that do not overload your audience.
• Use clear, simple language, avoiding jargon.
• Use active verbs and concrete facts.
• Explain the structure of your presentation at the beginning so that your listeners know what to expect.
• Link each section of your presentation.
• Signpost your presentation from beginning to end so that your listeners know where they are.
• Overcome your nerves.
• Establish audience rapport.
• Be aware of your body language.
• Understand cultural differences.
• Maintain interest by varying the speed, volume and pitch of your voice.
• Deal with listeners’ questions politely.
• Respond to your audience positively.

These tips are condensed from  Presentations in English .

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Creating PPP Lesson Plans: How to Teach ESL Effectively Using Presentation, Practice and Production

Want your students to be enthused, energetic learners?

Here’s a secret: It’s all in the lesson plan.

Using the PPP structure for your lessons will help you stay on track, deliver new material effectively and most importantly, help your students build new English skills.

PPP is a lesson plan template that consists of Presentation (P1), Practice (P2) and Production (P3) , and it’s often used for ESL (English as a Second Language) classes. It focuses on giving students a solid foundation for new concepts, then encouraging them to apply these on their own.   

Read on to find out how to deliver awesome ESL lessons with the PPP template!

What Makes an ESL Lesson Plan Exceptional?

How to make esl lesson plans with a ppp template, 1. presentation, 2. practice, 3. production.

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)

• Clear aims and objectives. First off, make sure you have a good understanding of your main goal for the lesson and how you propose to reach that goal. It’s also a great idea to share these with your students so they’ll know exactly what they will accomplish.
• Grading. Careful, we’re not talking about correcting work and giving letter grades here! This is the concept of climbing a hill, starting off with something easy or relatable to your students and then making the material more challenging as you ascend.
• PPP structure. This is one of the most used lesson plan formats in ESL. PPP (presentation, practice, production) allows you to develop a structured, graded and time-efficient lesson plan that conveys the material in an understandable way. 
• Effective time breakdown. Knowing when you should talk and when you should allow your students to engage is another key component. One strategy is jotting down time limits for each activity in the margins of the lesson plan sheet. For the PPP structure, a good time allotment might be 15 minutes of Presentation (P1), 20 minutes of practice (P2) and 25 minutes of production (P3).
• Relevant material. Take a few moments to gauge your student’s level, their interests, hobbies, work and home life. Consider showing videos, trending articles and other native content that your students would enjoy. For instance, FluentU features English videos like movie trailers and TV series clips, with interactive subtitles and transcripts for learners.

Let’s go through each step of the PPP template: 

Presentation is the first step, and it’s also the most important. This is your time to shine because it’s the main part of teaching : you’ll be explaining new concepts to your eager students.

At this stage, teachers should talk approximately 75% of the time. 

Make your lesson exciting and relatable 

Remember how boring it was when you had a teacher who only lectured, with little enthusiasm? Well, don’t be that teacher—break the mold and become animated. Students learn through context, so tell a story or use resources that excite students to learn more. Peaking interest is essential.

To lead students into the lesson, you can start with something familiar, such as material discussed in a previous class. For example, if you’re talking about house vocabulary, focus on the bedroom first, then break down the vocabulary inside of the bedroom.

Show visuals like photos and videos 

Use visuals to stimulate understanding and get your students curious about a topic.

If you are presenting key places in a city or town, using pictures of your students’ town/s will invoke interest and be relevant to their world.

For teaching home-related vocabulary, you can display photos from your home, relating them to relevant vocabulary. After that, show your students how to use vocabulary nouns with prepositions of place through statements like “The toaster is on the counter.” 

Ask thoughtful questions 

Once introduction is complete, you can then guide your students to analyze the material more closely. You are still in control of your classroom so keep presenting, but ask questions and make your students think more about what it is they are seeing and hearing.

Questions are also great for checking if students understand the new material. Don’t let them off the hook so easily. Try not to tell them answers, allowing them to work it out in English!

Practice is the second stage of the PPP lesson plan template. This is when you will hand over a bit of control to your students and let them try out the new material themselves. If your presentation was well-developed and awesome, your students will be more than ready to jump in.

In this stage, you will give your students a set of tasks or activities . These tasks should be challenging and only solvable with the new material, but not too difficult. 

The students will do most of the talking since they’ll be going over the material with you and their classmates. Generally, you can aim to let your students speak 65% of the time and just jump in every now and then to point out something new or answer questions. 

Guide your class through exercises

For a smooth transition into the practice stage, do exercises together with your students first, or work through questions together. 

To continue with the same example of rooms in a house, a great practice activity would be to let your students label nouns and prepositions of place around the room. There are many techniques for this, and you can go around the room looking out for trouble areas and helping out as needed.

Do pair and group practice

Once your students get more used to the material, you can begin pair and group activities.  

Allowing students to brainstorm and work together will encourage them to communicate more and learn about their classmates. For groupwork, you can even divide the class and organize a contest to make them more eager to focus on the material.

Production is the final stage in a PPP lesson plan. This is also referred to as the fluency stage—your students will now be like birds leaving the nest for the first time.

In the production stage, teacher talk time is at its lowest and almost nonexistent. Let your students be creative and develop their own work , speaking 90% of the time to your meager 10%. It’s important for them to gain confidence in English on their own.

Set up writing or speaking activities 

Most production activities involve writing or speaking, and sometimes both are combined if necessary. This allows your students to build confidence and be creative when using the new material, as it’s solely in their hands.

Carrying our example house vocabulary lesson through the final step, you can now let your students craft a short story or presentation involving the many things they have in their own home. They can write a script and present it to the class during production.

Encourage production through groupwork

Similar to the previous stage, you can separate your class into pairs or groups for production. They can construct dialogues, monologues, scripted plays and so on together.

One great pair exercise you can use is to have two students create a script using the new material and then let them act it out in front of the class.

A great, fun and material-rich lesson will keep your students encouraged to learn more and build their confidence as English speakers.

So for lesson plan success, be sure to construct a well-developed and exciting lesson plan using the PPP template. Good luck, and enjoy!

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PPP Framework in Teaching: Presentation, Practice and Production

The PPP Teaching Framework is a model to describe the typical stages of language teaching lesson.

The PPP Teaching framework consist of four main stages:  Warm-up, Presentation, Practice and Production and is used to teach speaking and writing lessons.

There is a variation when we use this framework to teach Listening and Reading skills .

The framework that we use to teach passive skills is the PDP framework which stands for Pre, While and Post

Let’s check all that you need to know to use the PPP Framework correctly

Table of Contents

PPP Framework: Criticism

Stages of the ppp framework, presentation, important considerations when planning lessons, considerations when teaching listening and reading, how to teach listening, how to teach reading , questions to ask yourself when creating ppp or pdp lessons, short quiz: how much did you learn, more on english language teaching.

This framework for teaching language classes is often criticized because:

• It forces students to use certain grammar structures and vocabulary.
• Since it forces students to use a target structure and vocabulary, this reduces the learner opportunities to use the language in spontaneous ways.

These are the stages of the PPP Framework:

• It’s an activity at the start of the class to warm up the learners. They tend to be short, dynamic activities.
• It is recommended that the warm- up is related to the topic studied during that class. 
• In my opinion, the most important thing about a dynamic warm-up is that you continue with dynamic activities  during the presentation, practice and production stage.

In the presentation stage, teacher introduces:

You can introduce the vocabulary and grammar in two different ways.

• Deductively : This involves the learners being given a general rule, which is then applied to specific language examples
• Inductively:   This approach starts with examples and asks learners to find rules

Important things to take into account:

• Choose the vocabulary and grammar structures necessary for your students to succeed.
• Don’t introduce vocabulary and grammar that won’t be used during the lesson.
• Try not to introduce lots of words. Keep new words to a maximum of 20 per lesson.
• Get students involved in the presentation of the vocabulary and grammar so you can reduce teacher talking time and encourage learner-centered instruction

The practice stage aims to provide opportunities for learners to use the target structure and vocabulary used during class.

This stage is also controlled practiced since the tasks prepared by the teacher have  controlled results.

Teacher should try to use the vocabulary and structures during the presentation stage for obvious reasons:

• What’s the point of introducing vocabulary and grammar you aren’t going to use?
• How can you expect students to succeed if you use different vocabulary and grammar to the one you taught in the presentation stage?

All meaningful activities which give students the opportunity to practice the language more freely.

It  is impossible to be wrong if:

• Your activities encourage peer to peer interaction.
• Students are taught grammar inductively.
•  Your lesson is made up of task that maximize student talking time.
• Students stand up and talk to others.
• There are games and activities that are fun and meaningful.
• Your scaffolding is good because students can do what you want them to do.

The Presentation, Practice and Production is usually used to teach speaking, writing or grammar.

If you want to focus on listening and reading, you have to take into account the PDP Framework

This framework is an approach to teaching reading and listening skills lessons.   

PDP means Pre- During (while) and Post

The basic idea is:

• Try to help students to know a little about what they’re going to read or listen before they read or hear it
• Give them a reason to read or listen by setting questions or other reading listening tasks
• Ask them to do something with the information they get from the reading or listening. 

The Framework for teaching listening is called Pre, While and Post.

Check out these resources to understand more about this framework

• 12 Types of Pre-Listening Activities
• 12 Examples of While-Listening Activities
• 10 Types of Post-Listening Activities for the ESL Classroom.

The Framework for teaching reading is called Pre, While and Post

• Stages for Teaching Reading
• 15 Examples of Pre-Reading Activities
• 10 Examples of While-Reading Activities
• 10 Examples of Post-Reading Activities
• Making Reading Communicative

These are some important questions that you should ask yourself when creating a PPP or PDP Lesson.

• Are the activities of the PPP lesson plan linked to each other?
• Are the activities of the PDP lesson plan linked to each other?
• Do the activities belong to the right stage of the lesson? For example, is the pre-reading activity an actual pre-reading activity?
• Is the lesson plan based on reality and not on impossible and unrealistic expectations
• Is the evaluation strategy measuring what you need to measure?
• Are activities engaging to the learner?

These are some statements that you should analyze and assign to a category of the PPP Framework

The categories being: Presentation (A), Practice (B) and Production (C)

• Teacher directs the activities during this stage ( )
• Teacher provides feedback to students ( )
• Activities include drills and multiple choice exercises ( )
• Students produce oral and written texts ( )
• Teacher uses visual aids to demonstrate a situation ( )
• Teacher describes grammar rules ( )
• Activities include oral presentations by the students ( )
• The teacher doesn’t necessarily intervene in this stage ( )
• Language is presented in context ( )
• Exercises in this stage can be productive or receptive ( )

I hope that you found everything that you were looking for about the PPP Framework

These are some posts with more ideas and information to teach English

• 5 Challenges English Language Learners Face
• 10 Characteristics of Teacher-Centered Instruction
• The Most Effective Classroom Seating Arrangements
• 15 Awesome ESL Games and Activities
• ESL Classroom Activities: Dictogloss
• Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching

I am Jose Manuel, English professor and creator of EnglishPost.org, a blog whose mission is to share lessons for those who want to learn and improve their English

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20 Presentation Tips for Your ESL Students

Helping learners to give presentations is an excellent way to encourage fluency. For some of your students, the ability to give a good presentation in English may be mandatory for their jobs. Here are twenty tips to help ensure a successful presentation, from beginning to end. Who knows? You may find them useful too.

• Allow plenty of time for preparation.
• Answer the all-important question-words: why? who? where? when? how? and what?.
• Structure your presentation into introduction, body, conclusion and questions.
• Write notes based on keywords.
• Rehearse your presentation several times and modify it as necessary.
• Select the right equipment for the job.
• Use your equipment effectively.
• Make use of clear, powerful visual aids that do not overload your audience.
• Use clear, simple language, avoiding jargon.
• Use active verbs and concrete facts.
• Explain the structure of your presentation at the beginning so that your listeners know what to expect.
• Link each section of your presentation.
• Signpost your presentation from beginning to end so that your listeners know where they are.
• Overcome your nerves.
• Establish audience rapport.
• Be aware of your body language.
• Understand cultural differences.
• Maintain interest by varying the speed, volume and pitch of your voice.
• Deal with listeners’ questions politely.
• Respond to your audience positively.

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• Tips for Tutoring Adult Students
• Doing It Effectively: 3 Tips For Teaching Vocabulary to Kids
• 7 Tips for Teaching ESL to Complete Beginners

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• Knowing the subject

Presenting vocabulary

This article looks at what needs to be taught when teaching vocabulary and ways to present and teach vocabulary.

• Introduction

What a student may need to know about an item

• Ways to present vocabulary

Alternative ways of teaching vocabulary

Other things to consider

Introduction With hundreds of thousands of words in the English language, teaching vocabulary can seem like a very daunting prospect. Remember though that the average native speaker uses around only five thousand words in everyday speech. Moreover, your students won't need to produce every word they learn, some they will just need to recognize. Selecting what to teach, based on frequency and usefulness to the needs of your particular students is therefore essential. Once you have chosen what to teach, the next important steps are to consider what students need to know about the items, and how you can teach them.

• What it means It is vital to get across the meaning of the item clearly and to ensure that your students have understood correctly with checking questions.
• The form Students need to know if it is a verb / a noun / an adjective etc to be able to use it effectively.
• How it is pronounced This can be particularly problematic for learners of English because there is often no clear relation between how a word is written and how it is pronounced. It is very important to use the phonemic script in such cases so the sts have a clear written record of the pronunciation. Don't forget also to drill words that you think will cause pronunciation problems for your students and highlight the word stresses.
• How it is spelt This is always difficult in English for the reason mentioned above. Remember to clarify the pronunciation before showing the written form.
• If it follows any unpredictable grammatical patterns For example, man-men / information (uncountable) and if the word is followed by a particular preposition (e.g. depend on)
• The connotations that the item may have Bachelor is a neutral/positive word whereas spinster conjures a more negative image.
• The situations when the word is or is not used Is it formal/neutral/informal? For example, spectacles/glasses/specs. Is it used mainly in speech or in writing? To sum up is usually written whereas mind you is spoken. Is it outdated? Wireless instead of radio.
• How the word is related to others For example, synonyms, antonyms, lexical sets.
• Collocation or the way that words occur together You describe things 'in great detail' not 'in big detail' and to ask a question you 'raise your hand' you don't 'lift your hand'. It is important to highlight this to students to prevent mistakes in usage later.
• What the affixes (the prefixes and suffixes) may indicate about the meaning For example, substandard sub meaning under. This is particularly useful at a higher level.

Which of these areas you choose to highlight will depend on the item you are teaching and the level of your students. Now it's time to think about how we can get the meaning across.

Ways to present vocabulary There are lots of ways of getting across the meaning of a lexical item.

• Illustration This is very useful for more concrete words (dog, rain, tall) and for visual learners. It has its limits though, not all items can be drawn.
• Mime This lends itself particularly well to action verbs and it can be fun and memorable.
• Synonyms/Antonyms/Gradable items Using the words a student already knows can be effective for getting meaning across.
• Definition Make sure that it is clear (maybe check in a learner dictionary before the lesson if you are not confident). Remember to ask questions to check they have understood properly.
• Translation If you know the students' L1, then it is fast and efficient. Remember that not every word has a direct translation.
• Context Think of a clear context when the word is used and either describe it to the students or give them example sentences to clarify meaning further.

Again which you choose will depend on the item you are presenting. Some are more suitable for particular words. Often a combination of techniques can be both helpful and memorable

• Give your students a few items of vocabulary and tell them to find the meaning, pronunciation and write an example sentence with the word in. They can then teach each other in groups.
• Prepare worksheets and ask your students to match words to definitions.
• Ask students to classify a group of words into different categories. For example, a list of transport words into air/sea/land.
• Ask students to find new vocabulary from reading homework and teach the other students in the class.
• Review the vocabulary you teach through a game or activity and encourage your students to do the same at home
• Encourage autonomy in your learners. Tell them to read, watch films, listen to songs etc and note the useful words
• Have a section of your board for vocabulary items that come up as you are teaching. Use different colours for the word / the phonemics / the prepositions / the part of speech
• It is a good idea to teach/learn words with associated meanings together
• Encourage your students to purchase a good dictionary and use class time to highlight the benefits of one
• Teach your students the grammatical names for the parts of speech and the phonemic script
• Always keep a good dictionary by your side in case a student asks about a word you don't know
• If you don't and have never heard of the word, tell the student you will check and get back to them. Do get back to them
• Give extra examples sentences to the students if they are unsure and encourage them to write the word in an example sentence (maybe for homework)

Very informative

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informative

Very useful!

Teaching Vocabulary

It is very informative, presenting vocabulary.

Very informative and i benefited from it

Dear Richard Frost, my name is Shaxzodaxon, from Tashkent city of independent Uzbekistan. I am language student at the Kimyo international university of Tashkent. I found the above article very useful and interesting. These methods can help to improve students' knowledge.Before reading it I knew some of them. Your article presents and teaches vocabulary in an unusual format for many teachers. Moreover format to teach,help for majority learners. I will definitely use your method. Thanks for your reply.

Quite Useful

Very informative.

A very informative and practical article

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• Apr 5, 2022

TEFL basics: Meaning, pronunciation, form. Three ways to ensure deeper language learning

When we plan to teach a piece of grammar or vocabulary, it is important that we plan for students to be able to understand it and use it correctly. In order to achieve this aim, it is important to consider three factors: meaning (or concept), pronunciation and form (or structure). If we deal with these three aspects in turn, our students are more likely to retain what we teach and be able to use it when they need to.

There are many ways of knowing a word, phrase or grammar structure. Most school curricula assume that students ‘know’ something if they can reproduce it in a written test after having learnt it. However, remembering the meaning of a word and using it to fill a gap in a sentence is not the same type of ‘knowing’ that is required in a conversation, or when listening to a podcast, or when trying to explain a complex idea using that language.

Meaning: More than just ‘knowing’ a word

Deeper understanding of a word, phrase or grammar item starts with its concept. Concepts are non-linguistic - they are the stored meanings in the brain, which are used to make sense of the world. Words themselves are a tool for organising those concepts, and communicating them to the outside world. So, it follows that before being presented with a new, unfamiliar word, we should make sure that the concept behind that word is clear. This means presenting non-linguistic cues to meaning, which ready the learners’ brains to receive the word itself.

A non-linguistic cue can be a picture, sound or video clip which show the concept of the word you will present, but without the learner seeing or hearing the word itself. For more abstract words and phrases, or to teach a grammar structure, you may not be able to show the concept visually, so a quick story or situation can do the same job. Tell the class about a friend of yours who did something, or who has a certain characteristic. Don’t say the word you are teaching or use the grammar you are presenting, but ask the students to fill in the meaningful gap with the word or sentence structure if they know it.

As we can see, presenting concepts can be tricky, and it can take some thought about how to give the students the idea of the word you are teaching without directly saying or showing the word itself. See our other article for more on why meaning should be separated from form when presenting new language.

Pronunciation first - presenting new language orally

The English spelling system is a very confusing thing. There are very few standardised sound-letter relationships, especially with vowels (and all words have vowels). With this in mind, it is best to deal with pronunciation before looking at the written form of a word. Any word or grammatical structure is pronounced in the same way, no matter how many irregular or silent spellings it contains. This means that the spoken form of a word is more accessible than the written form, despite not involving any kind of visual support.

Focusing on pronunciation before written form has many benefits: firstly, hearing an authentic, connected version of a phrase fixes its real form in the learners’ minds first, so they will recognise it when you come to say it again (which you will, many times, if that is the target language that you are teaching). Familiarising learners with spoken forms also helps them to produce it, firstly through controlled drills, then perhaps in response to practice tasks , and finally (hopefully), independently in their own speaking. The sooner they have access to an authentic pronunciation of what they are learning, the better.

We often think of drilling as a way of introducing and fixing the sound of individual words, but pronunciation is equally important for grammar teaching . Most grammatical structures consist of several words spoken together, so as above, the sooner learners can process these structures as chunks of language, the more easily they will retain the whole structure, rather than as individual words.

Drilling verb phrases for tense work also gives an opportunity to work with the features of connected speech, to help learners produce a more natural sound in the grammar that they are studying. After all, we don’t only use grammar to read and write - we need it to process speech through listening and produce meaningful spoken language, both of which skills are often underdeveloped in second language learners coming out of high school English classes.

Substitution drilling is a good technique for generating different patterns of speech out of grammar items. Drilling chunks of language and substituting one part of the structure you are teaching each time you drill it can show learners which parts of the grammar are adaptable for different meanings - by time, number, person or verb (the features of a sentence which commonly change to show different ideas. For example, a substitution drill for the present perfect simple tense might go as follows:

She’s been to Italy

He’s been to Italy

He’s been to France

He’s visited France

They’ve visited France

They’ve come back from France

They’ve come back from the airport

By substituting different pronouns, verbs, objects, etc., we can build student confidence with simple forms and extend sentences using slightly more complex structures, changing one word or phrase at a time.

The written form - the final piece in the puzzle

Finally, once all students have understood the concept of the item you are teaching, heard it spoken and had the chance to try out its pronunciation, learners are ready to work with the written form of the word or structure.

Don’t be too quick to display the written form of a word - remember, the written form can distract from its sound, and there is a lot of work that can be achieved with concept and pronunciation without learners seeing the word itself.

However, dealing with form in a visual way, through sentence examples, tasks and form equations, is a good final step to consolidate the understanding that you have enabled up to now.

For grammar teaching, a display of the form is more complex than simply writing a sentence on the whiteboard. Form equations show the patterns of grammar rather than a specific meaning in the form of a sentence. Form equations are designed to be applied to any example of the grammar being used. For example, a form equation for the present perfect simple, which could be applied to any of the examples from the substitution drill above, would look like:

Subject + have/has + Verb (past participle) + Object

Or, to save time and whiteboard space, it’s a good idea to get students working with the annotated forms of the grammar terms above, for example:

S + aux. (have/has) + V(pp) + O

Once students know their form equations, they can quickly check the grammar that they use against these, and confirm whether they are structuring their sentences accurately.

As you can see, these three aspects of language: meaning, pronunciation, form, are quite rightly grouped in that order. This is the essence of the ‘MPF’ principle of language teaching. This is also known as ‘meaning before form’ or ‘COW’ (Concept-Oral-Written), all of which aim for the same process outlined here. When you plan to teach vocabulary or grammar next, make sire you plan for work in these three important areas, to give your learners the most effective experience of the language they are learning .

Tom Garside is Director of Language Point Teacher Education. Language Point delivers the internationally recognised RQF level 5 Trinity CertTESOL in a totally online mode of study , and the RQF level 6 Trinity College Certificate for Practising Teachers , a contextually-informed teacher development qualification with specific courses which focus on online language education or online methodology.

If you are interested to know more about these qualifications, or you want take your teaching to a new level with our teacher education courses, contact us or see our course dates and fees for details.

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What is TEFL?

With so many different acronyms and names, the world of TEFL can be a bit confusing. Let The TEFL Org guide you through the world of teaching English!

With so many acronyms, types of ESL teaching certifications , and opportunities across the world, it’s sometimes hard to understand what everything means when it comes to TEFL. 

For example, what actually is TEFL, beyond a pleasing-sounding acronym? Is ESOL the same thing? What about TESOL, and how long is my TEFL/TESOL/ESL qualification valid? What do I need to teach abroad? What is a TEFL certification? It’s a minefield - make no mistake about it.

So, here at The TEFL Org, we decided it was time to clear a few things up when it comes to Teaching English as a Foreign Language. Otherwise, how can our potential students be clear about what they’re trying to qualify for?

Is TESOL the same as TEFL? 

Frequently, the acronyms TEFL and TESOL are used interchangeably. TESOL stands for Teaching English as a Second Language and is often used to refer to teaching language learners within an English-speaking country, as well as abroad. Generally speaking, TEFL and TESOL courses are the same.

Enrolling in a TEFL or TESOL course will enhance your abilities for comparable responsibilities. It's important to understand the distinctions between TEFL and TESOL to differentiate them.

Is ESL the same as TEFL?

We’ve compiled everything prospective ESL teachers need to know in an article on how to become an ESL teacher

What is TEFL? 

TEFL, short for Teaching English as a Foreign Language, is all about teaching English to people who may have some, little, or no knowledge of the language. This could involve teaching abroad or online, covering basics for beginners or refining grammar and language skills for those more advanced. 

The TEFL qualification can open up various opportunities, like teaching English in different parts of the world, starting your own tutoring business, or volunteering locally. It can also mean helping students prepare for exams like IELTS or TOEFL, which are important for those planning to move to an English-speaking country. 

In a nutshell, TEFL is about teaching English in new communities or assisting others with language skills in your own community.

What does TEFL training involve? 

There are different hours involved in a TEFL certification course. An industry standard course, the kind that will almost guarantee employment teaching English abroad, lasts for 120 hours . There are courses that go on for longer, and there are also advanced courses, including topics such as Business English and teaching young learners, which can top up your skill set. The foundation, though, is a 120-hour course.

With so many quirks and rules, English can be hard to teach initially, just as it can be hard to learn. However, a TEFL certification course, and the process of earning a TEFL certificate, should give you everything you need. By that, we mean you should have enough time to learn the material. You should have excellent one-to-one tutoring and all the facilities you need to succeed, all included in the cost.

Some courses, although rarely the online TEFL courses, may provide a practicum - a practical teaching rehearsal if you like - but these aren’t strictly necessary. A good TEFL course will have you ready for teaching regardless. 

TEFL fact and fiction

There are plenty of myths and half-truths in the TEFL industry, sadly. Whether it’s misconceptions and assumptions about TEFL courses or mixed information, some people don’t feel as though they can get involved with the world of Teaching English as a Second Language or Teaching English as a Foreign Language.

It’s actually far more accessible than you might think. Let’s bust a few myths that trip people up when it comes to teaching English.

Do you need another language? No, not for a TEFL course. There’s no getting around the fact that being a polyglot can only help, especially if you travel to a foreign country and know the language. However, you don’t need to be fluent in a range of languages, just skilled in English. 

Even if you're not from a nation of native English speakers, you can still complete any number of TEFL certification courses. Online TEFL teaching means that English language instruction is an industry open to all, wherever you're from. TEFL certification online is a booming new industry, and it's just as useful for getting a job teaching English abroad as any in-class offering.

What if I’m too young or too old to teach? There’s another prevalent myth about TEFL: it’s a young person’s game, a gap-year pursuit between school and college. That just isn’t the case.

Sure, a great number of English teachers abroad are in their 20s and 30s. Counterpoint: so what? There are plenty of great reasons to teach English , and there’s value in both youthful exuberance and in experience. Fine, you are extremely unlikely to be able to teach until you’re at least 18, and there are some upper age limits for teachers in certain countries, but there are more opportunities than there are barriers. You can teach English online or teach English abroad at most ages.

Do you need a teaching qualification? Not to become TEFL certified, no. To take a TEFL course, it’s not required to have a teaching qualification of any kind to get started. For many, TEFL is about exploring options within a new career arc. One of the USPs of the TEFL experience is that anyone can do it, should they have the enthusiasm and the time to learn how it’s done. 

Do you need a degree? Not always. In much the same nature as our previous discussion on teaching qualifications, a TEFL certificate wouldn’t be the game-changer it is if you had to have a degree to get involved. However, in terms of actually teaching abroad, and qualifying for a working visa, some countries and employers do insist on a degree.

To teach English to a high standard abroad, and to get TEFL qualified, you don’t need to have graduated from anywhere.

What is a TEFL certificate?

The primary purpose of a TEFL certification course is to equip individuals with the essential skills needed for teaching English as a foreign language. Fluency in English does not necessarily translate to effective teaching for English language learners, and a TEFL certification ensures that educators are well-prepared to meet the unique challenges of language instruction.

What does TEFL certification mean?

What TEFL certification can do for an individual is really quite something.

Foremost, a TEFL qualification means you can teach English as a foreign language. However, there’s so much more to it than just that. It means you can travel overseas and guarantee yourself a job teaching English to young learners, secondary school pupils, adults, the elderly - whoever needs it. TEFL certification is a ticket to the rest of the world, in a sense, where employment opportunities are widespread. When it comes to English language teaching, we hate using clichés; but the world really is your oyster.

It also means you can teach English online, which is just as exciting. All you need is a strong internet connection and a TEFL qualification to get going, either for a company or for yourself. If you have that entrepreneurial spirit, you can quite easily set up shop and build a client base as a tutor. Or, if you prefer to work within an established infrastructure, there are plenty of excellent English Teaching companies that are looking to take on all kinds of new applicants.

Fundamentally, though, what it means is a new skill set. A TEFL certification is objective proof of your ability to teach written and verbal English. It’s also evidence of an ability to step up to new challenges, be decisive in your career, and be adaptable to adding new attributes to your repertoire. Employers, needless to say, will be impressed if you've completed a TEFL certification program!

Becoming TEFL certified really is worth it - becoming TEFL certified (whether through online courses or an in-person TEFL course) means you can totally change the course of your life and your career.

What TEFL qualification do I need?

When it comes to TEFL courses, the choices are expansive . There are arguments between, for example, Level 5 TEFL courses and 120-hour TEFL courses. The value of advanced courses, for example, has also come into focus over recent years.

The level 5 versus 120 hours debate comes up most often. So, to break it down, let’s consider the choice.

We would recommend a 120-hour over a Level 5 if you have a minimum of a BA degree in any discipline, you have some previous teaching experience, you’re a native English speaker with a passport from Britain, Ireland, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand or South Africa and you’re seeking work in a country with high demand for English teachers

Meanwhile, we would suggest taking a Level 5 TEFL certification course over a 120-hour if you do not have a degree, you have no previous teaching experience, English isn’t your first language - or you don’t have a passport from the UK, Ireland, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand or South Africa - you’re aiming to work in a country with a competitive jobs market or online and you don’t feel very confident about teaching quite yet.

“Need” is, of course, subjective, but if you’re looking to carve a niche for yourself as a teacher, an Advanced TEFL program could be exactly what your CV requires. For example, if you’re teaching English abroad in a country with an emergent economy, Business English is a great idea. If you want to coach students through exams, an Advanced TEFL program on exam preparation would fit the bill perfectly. 

It’s worth trying a free TEFL course as a sampler if you’re not sure about what TEFL program it is you need to do. TEFL Org has detailed information on all the TEFL programs we provide .

Where can I get a TEFL qualification? 

Nowadays, especially in the post-pandemic era, you’ll find that online TEFL program providers have upped their game. The most reputable and accredited TEFL course providers have a strong online presence, as well as the facilities to create a cohesive and comprehensive distance-learning experience. However, the same providers also tend to offer excellent classroom TEFL courses, which are now opening up again after the pandemic. So, whether you want to study from a distance, or up close - or both - the options are absolutely there.

The TEFL Org, for example, offers a fantastic range of courses , along with a helpful, interactive learning experience, which gives students the chance to communicate directly with tutors and classmates over the duration of their TEFL course. There are also classroom TEFL programs available, in locations like Ireland, the UK, and Spain.

Make sure the course provider you use has accreditation from a number of recognized bodies, like OFQUAL and DEAC. Accreditation is important : it means that regulatory organizations have deemed the course offerings to be of significant value and that the course provider meets regulatory standards and practices.

How long does it take to get TEFL certified?

120 hours of TEFL program training is the industry standard, and it’s typically specified on job adverts. This is seen as the minimum amount of training required to get started teaching English. As a rule, 120 hours of TEFL study will generally get you appropriately prepared, whether you end up teaching online, or you teach English abroad. On average, a 120-hour TEFL certification takes six weeks for those who are dedicated and have ample free time.

Taking a TEFL certification course with fewer hours puts you at a serious disadvantage. Employers won’t look at an applicant, generally speaking, if they don’t meet the required 120 hours. Realistically, you won’t have learned enough.

There are Groupon and discount courses that promise TEFL certification within a very limited window of time. However, these courses don’t sufficiently prepare potential teachers, and many participants taking these courses will find that there are plenty of add-ons. Typically, that’s materials or time, which means that these discount courses become prohibitively expensive.

How much does a TEFL course cost? 

There’s a lot of variation regarding the cost of a TEFL course .

There are eye-catching, discount courses out there, but be careful. Groupon and discount courses won’t provide the level of detail and care that a more established TEFL course provider will. Often, low-price TEFL courses promise TEFL certification within a small number of hours. Simply put, you can’t prepare yourself adequately to teach English abroad in less than 120 hours, minimum. 

How long is TEFL certification valid? 

MPF – How to ‘Introduce’ Language in a Communicative Classroom

• Post author By hdimmideck
• Post date December 18, 2016

Meaning, Form and Pronunciation

For many of us familiar with CELTA or other TEFL courses, the acronym MFP will have come to be regarded as one of the most important of the many acronyms we come across for teaching a second language. Used for both lexis and grammar, these three simple and easy-to-remember little letters were branded into our teaching methodology from day one as essential steps to follow when introducing any new piece of vocabulary or grammar with your students.

It’s simple enough – first you cover the Meaning , clarifying with the learners exactly what is being said. Next comes the Form. In the case of vocabulary, this is simply the spelling. With grammar, this is where we analyse the structure of the language itself, for example ‘subject + have + past participle’ for the present perfect. Next, traditionally, we would drill the Pronunciation of the new phrase or with grammar we would look perhaps at some of the cuter aspects of connected speech or regional pronunciation.

It’s all well and good, but even on my CELTA course itself there were doubts and murmurings amongst the trainers about whether this was still the appropriate pattern to follow when introducing new language to your learners.

The issue isn’t the content itself. Even if it’s perhaps a little over simplified, all aspects of language can be stripped down to these three simple parts. No, it’s rather the order in which we introduce them that is the issue.

One of my trainers at International House London (all of whom were incredibly inspirational in their own way) was adamant about structuring your language presentation not as MFP , but as MPF . This is a relatively simple change to teaching pronunciation before you teach the form, or rather before you show or analyse the form. As time has gone by I’ve grown to realise that this is not only sound advice, but essential in many parts of the world for avoiding engrained pronunciation errors and general confusion.

Reasons for Teaching with MPF

If you teach using  MFP bravo, you’re already using a solid and proven teaching structure that not only caters to your students’ needs but also introduces language in a logical, engaging manner. However, if you genuinely want your students to get the most out of your lessons, it’s time to change.

Here’s why…

• First and foremost, the form of most vocabulary in the English language is a distraction. Spelling is notoriously inconsistent and by showing how a word is spelt before you really nail the pronunciation, learners will most likely follow what their eyes, rather than their ears have told them.
• If they see a word before they hear it, problem phonemes will generally be exaggerated by learners. For unusual sounds such as ‘th’ or ‘ght’ in a word such as ‘thought’, students will naturally want to try and pronounce them as they would in their own language, which as you can imagine will result in some strange and unintelligible pronunciation. By drilling the word beforehand, the pronunciation becomes dominant, and when they finally realise it’s spelt ‘thought’ and not ‘thort’, it’s much easier for them to accept.
• We’re teaching in the 21st century. When you ask any language student why they are studying a language their main goal will be the ability to speak it. Whilst it’s not exactly easy to pin down precisely what ‘The Communicative Method’ is, one thing is for certain – the fluency and ability for your learner to speak is the main focus over being able to use grammar perfectly. Whilst the latter can help with the former, it should not be the priority for the average student.  (This is not to say that grammar and form is not important, of course it is. It’s to say that in a given situation, an emergency for example, it is better to be speaking quickly and clearly, if inaccurately, than with perfect accuracy at unintelligible pace or with difficult pronunciation.)
• Learning how to pronounce and say language before seeing it’s form is undoubtedly the most natural way of learning a language. As children we learn to speak incredibly well before we even start trying to write. Language is at it’s core a form of spoken communication, whereas writing and reading are evolutions of it. Looking at it another way, there are tens of thousands of native English speakers who are illiterate, yet can clearly and correctly communicate with people. Are they any less native-level speakers of the language?

The Real Problem with MFP

A good example of the problems that can be caused my  MFP comes from my experience teaching in Italy. The word ‘hair’, for example, is notoriously difficult for Italians. Despite being only one syllable, it contains one phoneme which simply doesn’t exist in Italian (the ‘h’ sound at the start) and two phonemes which, despite there existing similar sounds, are generally pronounced too strongly.

In Italian, like Spanish, the spelling of a word generally suggests how it is pronounced. So if the word ‘hair’ is shown to students before they hear the pronunciation, they will instantly try to pronounce it more like ‘higher’.

You’d think that with some drilling, this could be eliminated but at elementary level, there are dozens of words with phonemes like this. Air, hair, his, is, eyes, our, hours, coat, house, boat, car, are and there are just a handful of short, straight forward words than can cause nightmares for English teachers in Italy. With all the new vocabulary and grammar being introduced at these levels, it’s crucial to make pronunciation the key focus for language reproduction over writing and spelling, as they are simply much more likely to require their L2 in a situation that involves speaking than writing.

If too much emphasis is placed on form over pronunciation, the damage it will do can take months to fix. By teaching and drilling the pronunciation first, by ear, students learn as they would if they were a child once again, absorbing sounds and language through context rather than a grammatical explanation. It’s a simple tweak to your methodology, and the rewards will be great for both you and your students.

So what are you waiting for?

A Note on Phonemes

The phonemic script is terrifying to new teachers, and most never bother to learn it. However, if you want your students to be able to learn outside of the classroom (which every teacher should want) you will want to introduce the phonemic script to your learners to some degree as soon as your comfortable with it.

There are many resources online for doing this, and we will be including some of our favourites in a future blog post. For now, however, remember that by encouraging your students to understand the phonemic script, you are giving them the tools to tackle new vocabulary without requiring a native to model the sound.

Do you currently teaching using MFP or MPF? What are your thoughts on it? Is communication or grammar the priority in your teaching methodology? We’d love to know, leave a comment below!

This is part two in our series ‘Nurturing and Promoting Conversation in the Classroom’. Part one, ‘Don’t Interrupt! How to Correct Correctly’ can be found here . Sign up to our newsletter and never miss a post, or follow us on the social media links on this page.

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