I would request you not to lose your sense of direction by looking for different methods. The English Language is all about innovation. As far as the English Language is concerned it is practically impossible to narrow down on an effective methodology since the dynamics by way of student profile varies significantly. Each batch is a new challenge for the trainer.

As trainers we should have the courage to innovate and implement our methodology during the training process. The process of rediscovering ourselves as trainers never ends.

I think PPP was developed as a 'soft' approach to Communicative Language Teaching (CLT).

As far as I'm aware, CLT came about in the late 70s as a reaction against things like: heavy focus on grammar; language being learned as knowledge rather than skill; behaviourist approaches to learning, etc.  What the first CLT people said was that language was best learned through doing.  The idea was the focus should be on meaning and use, not on form, and that people needed to actually read, listen, speak and write for communicative purposes rather than just practise grammatical structures through gap-fills and substitution.

The problem was, it was too new an idea at the time, and many (if not most) teachers, students, and publishers weren't happy with the change (whether it was a good change or not).

So then people came up with the idea of combining CLT and traditional approaches - a soft communicative approach.  The idea was that we should study grammatical structures as always, then do all the gap-fills and substitution as always, but to finish off with more communicative and realistic practice.  That lead to Presentation (studying the grammar), Practice (doing the gap-fills and substitution drills), and Production (actually reading and speaking with the focus on meaning, use and communication).

Sometimes the three P's aren't obvious at first, but the following type of lesson is fairly common and is a form of PPP:

• Lead In (introduce the topic)
• Reading 1 (reading for gist)
• Reading 2 (scanning for specific information)
• Language Focus (completing discovery tasks that draw attention to a certain grammatical point)
• Practice 1 (controlled practice, such as writing 6 sentences using that grammar)
• Practice 2 (freer practice, such as doing a role-play in pairs)

In this, the Lead In and Reading stages are there to build up a communicative context, but the aim is to use that context to focus on the language (Presentation) and then to go through those two stages of using the language, the controlled stage (Practice) and the freer stage (Production).

The main disadvantages to PPP seem to me to be:

• It creates the impression that grammar is the main key to language learning.
• If Ss aren't ready to learn, or don't want or need to learn, that particular grammar point, the whole lesson can be a bit of a waste.
• Ss never really get a chance to practice realistic communication.  (Because any 'production' will be so influenced by the heavy grammar focus and controlled practice, that Ss will try to produce that grammar point rather than try to communicate - they will focus on the form and structure more than on meaning and use.)

That's what I seem to have picked up, anyway.  Not sure that I've seen any definitive text on it either.  I wonder if the more recent version of Richards and Rodgers comments on it - I've got an older version.

That's an interesting question.  I'm not sure about 'eclecticism'.  I guess it's okay if the teacher chooses very carefully based on students' needs and lesson aims.  It can lead to really unstructured, aimless, semi-organised courses/lessons, though. 

I wonder if there's already a forum discussing eclecticism... I'm going to have a look now.