This week, I responded to a question about the PACE model in one of the Facebook groups to which I belong.
The question was simply to elaborate on the PACE model. So I did. I thought the reply was worth sharing with a wider audience, so I am posting it here as well.
In their book “Enacting the Work of Language Instruction”, Glisan and Donato describe PACE as:
Presenting a short text, orally or in writing
Attention calling – to a particular form in the text
Co-Constructing an explanation
Extending and using the form in a new context
(I had to make the second point sound unwieldy because the word “Attention” is part of the acronym but didn’t come first in the explanation in the book.)
This may be a good way to teach students who have already acquired a language (or at least a good bit of a language) information that will help them edit their production (i.e., employ the Monitor function). It does not, however, aid acquisition because it is conscious learning. If Krashen and VanPatten are correct, then the PACE model supports acquisition only insofar as 1) the initial text is in the target language (so learners are receiving additional comprehensible input) and 2) the co-construction of an explanation is done in the target language (once again providing additional comprehensible input). But there does not seem to be any expectation that the co-construction of an explanation of the form will be done in the target language. It could just as easily be done in English (or the students’ native language). Any gains in acquisition are the result of exposure to the target language, not the focus on form.
Otherwise, this is essentially a hybrid (inductive-deductive) variant of the Present – Practice – Perform model, which is a skills model of language learning.
Why do I call it a hybrid? On the one hand, students extract, with the help of the teacher, the rule or principle from the text. That is inductive. On the other hand, students then take the principle and apply it to specific instances in the Extension phase of the model. That is deductive.
I find it interesting that Glisan and Donato hold this model up for emulation when they condemn both inductive and deductive instruction in the same chapter. (Glisan and Donato 2017, pp. 90-91) They espouse “Focus on Form as a Social Process” based on the presupposition that “the essence of language [is] social action”. (p. 91) (That is a presupposition that ought to be debated, btw.) Yet, the process they put forward uses both inductive and deductive instruction. Perhaps they are condemning purely inductive and purely deductive instruction, but that is not clear. Instead, they present their view as a tertium quid, not just a hybrid of the two recognized methods of reasoning.
I took part in a phone call with BVP at ACTFL2017. During the conversation, the PACE method came up, and BVP rejected it on essentially the same grounds that I do: it is a variant of the old Present – Practice – Perform model that does not support acquisition.
Excursus:
The main difference between PACE and PPP, as far as I can tell, is the process involved in arriving at the “rule”. PPP in the classic form is purely deductive instruction: state the rule or principle, apply it to individual instances (practice), prove that you understand the principle (perform).
PACE, on the other hand, arrives at the principle through inductive instruction – similar to the idea behind the old Audio-Lingual Method. That is, you look at individual instances of a phenomenon and extract the general principle from them. ALM generally stopped there. (All of those substitution and chain drills were designed to lead the learner to an understanding of the principle behind the form.) PACE continues with an application of the principle to specific instances, thus adding a deductive element to the inductive process of deriving the principle.
I hope all of that makes sense.
Hah! Forgive the late comment, because I’m way behind in reading the messages in my inbox and just got around to this. And I had to laugh. When I began teaching in a French lycée in the mid ’90s, I was advised to get all the professional development I could. At that time it was centered around something called “Pratique raisonnée de la langue”. Reading your explanation of PACE, I recognized that former acquaintance. All our textbooks were built around it and our lessons were expected to be modeled by it.
You might want to know that the “new” thing in France now is acquiring language through tasks. You give students a task to do in which they need to use English and mysteriously, magically, they acquire the language. The last year I taught, I sat in on a meeting with the Inpecteur Pédagogique and he referred rather contemptuously to a teacher he had just inspected who was “still using Pratique Raisonnée de la Langue.”
My thoughts were that I was lucky to have discovered teaching with CI, which is definitely not a fad that someone is going to be pooh poohing a few years later.