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As Skehan writes, the most influential traditional method of organising laguage teaching is referred to as PPP - presentation, practice and production (Skehan, 93). This traditional method is used all over the world by a lot of teachers. The aim of a PPP lesson is to teach a specific language form, e.g. a grammatical structure or the realisation of a particular function. The language is tightly controlled and the emphasis is on getting the new form correct.
In the presentation stage, the teacher begins by presenting an item of language in a context or situation to clarify its meaning. In the practice stage, the learners repeat target items and practice sentences until they can say or write them correctly. In the production stage, finally, learners are expected to produce the items they have just learnt, in a "free" situation.
Although this way of teaching new items seems logical and efficient, there are nevertheless several problems with this paradigm. Sometimes learners manage to pass the production stage without using the target form at all. Sometimes they tend to overuse the target form and produce very unnatural pieces of conversation. Besides, PPP gives an illusion of mastery since learners can often produce the required forms confidently in the classroom, but once outside, they either do not produce them at all or use them incorrectly.
According to Willis, the PPP cycle derives from the "behaviourist view of learning, which rests on the principle that repitition helps to 'automate' responses, and that practice makes perfect" (Willis, 135). Yet, language learning rarely happens in an additive way, with bits of language being learnt one after the other. Language learners rather take advantage of their exposure to the target language in use and grapple with meaning, try to understand underlying structures and observe how others express the meanings they want to be able to convey at the same time. We cannot predict what learners are going to learn at any given stage. Instruction, as stated above, does help but it cannot guarantee when something is learnt. Rich and well-chosen exposure to the target language helps language develop gradually and organically, out of the learner's own experience. The PPP cycle, still, restricts the learner's experience of language by focusing on a single item. Therefore, the goal of the last stage, the production phase, namely free production, is often not achieved.
The task-based learning framework offers far more opportunities for free language use. All components of the learning cycle are free of language control. Learners rely upon the linguistic resources they have already acquired and always use language for a genuine purpose. The task supplies a genuine need to use language to communicate, and the other components follow naturally from the task. The process of consciousness raising used in language focus activities encourages learners to think and to analyse, not simply to repeat, manipulate and apply.
The framework solves another language-teaching problem; that of providing a context for grammar teaching and form-focused activities. In a PPP cycle, where the presentation of the target language comes first, this context has to be invented. In task-based learning, the context is already established by the task itself.
Here, the concept of focused and unfocused communication tasks has to be considered. Ellis makes a distinction between these two. In the case of unfocused communication tasks,
no effort is made in the design of execution of a task to give prominence to any particular linguistic feature. The language used to perform the task is natural and only very broadly determined by the content of the task.
(Ellis, 82)
A focused communication task, in contrast,
does result in some linguistic feature being made prominent, although not in a way that causes the learner to pay more attention to form than meaning.
(Ellis, 83)
The teacher's roles and approach to lesson planning also differ. In a PPP lesson, teachers are in the centre of the class, having everything under control. In task-based learning, however, teachers have to learn to set things up and then hold back, intervening only when needed and reviewing each phase at the end.
So far, we have mainly been concerned with oral communication in the task cycle. Of course, also the skill of writing should be trained within this framework. Yet, the approach towards this also differs from the traditional PPP approach. In real life, only a small proportion of people do more than writing personal letters or filling out forms, even in their first language. Language learners, of course, need to write for other reasons. It is well known that writing is in itself a learning process. It helps people clarifying ideas and creating new ones.
In real life, we only write in order to communicate something to someone. Foreign language writing is traditionally often done for display, so it can be graded rather than for any real communication purpose. To make a change, to give learners a real sense of purpose and to raise motivation, task-based learning promotes the idea of thinking of audiences that might benefit by reading something learners have written. Guide books to the village or town where the school is set or brochures about local activities could be useful for tourists and visitors, a brief school history might be interesting for parents and a class magazine or a diary of a holiday course could be read by other classes or learners.
Summing up, a PPP cycle, according to Willis, "leads from accuracy to fluency; a task-based learning cycle leads from fluency to accuracy" (Willis, 137). It begins by providing learners with a holistic experience in language and then helps them to analyse this language in order to learn more efficiently. PPP, on the other hand, provides specific language items in a vacuum and then looks for some activity to practise them.
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