Accuracy, fluency and complexity - Scott Thornbury

This article is taken from English Teaching Professional.

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All teachers face the problem of students who are either too careful in speaking or too careless. It can be frustrating listening to the first kind as they form their sentences in their mind and it can be impossible to understand the second kind as they talk without correcting their language.

Scott Thornbury looks at how the PPP model (Presentation, Practice, Production) claims to deal with this problem and then offers some practical solutions of his own. His opinion? We need to "abandon once and for all the one-track model of learning enshrined in the PPP methodology."