(Edited by Zhiyin LI, Yongxi CHEN, Bofeng ZHANG, Bingru GAO)
Have you ever noticed the role that project work plays in learners’ fluency and competency?
Image from pixabay.com
Introduction
Project work has become a key concept of ELT and received much attention from many researchers. published an article discussing and evaluating project work. In her study, she first defines fluency, an important competence for language learners. Then, she discusses the importance of project work and its distinctive features. In this blog, we will present adetailed analysis of project work and how it improves learners’ fluency and communicative competence for you.
Fluency of language learner
In ELT, fluency has acquired two different meanings. The first one is derived from the dictionary meaning and refers to a learner’s competence to speak and write a particular language competently. The expectation of this kind of fluency relates to learners’ language ability to link syntactic segments and to produce a correct and complete sentence with ease. The second one emphasizes learners’ natural language use in the classroom. The ideal state of this fluency is that the speakers’ language interaction comes closer to their communication in their mother tongue. Consideration should be given to the negotiation of meaning between learners and be more meaning-focused rather than form-focused.
Project work
Project work is an extended task that integrates language skills through various activities to work towards an agreed goal. By using project work, we can improve language learners’ fluency.
Examples of project work include producing a radio program, researching endangered species, and creating a wall display using food labels. Project work has been part of educational thinking and practice for many years and is now part of the English language curriculum in many contexts.
Image from pixabay.com
Types of projects
Legutke and Thomas (1991) describe three types of projects based on case studies conducted in the UK, USA, and Germany.
- Encounter projects: To come into contact with native speakers in daily life or through digital media.
- Text projects: To use English text in discussion, e.g., to read, discuss and dramatize a play with classmates.
- Class correspondence project: To exchange letters and photographs, e.g., between school pupils in different countries.
Features of project work
- Using authentic English language materials, e.g., restaurant menus, magazine
- Prioritizing group work rather than teacher-directed activities, e.g., debate, group discussion
- Promoting student responsibility in planning and presenting the task
- Conducting a series of activities over a period of time, utilizing a range of skills, e.g., role play for speaking and listening
- Engaging in activities outside the classroom, e.g., Field Trips and Field-Based Learning
Advantages of project work
This part evaluates some of the benefits of project work on language learners.
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Project work allows learners to use language in a meaningful way to improve their fluency.
Project work enables language learners to have more access to authentic tasks lacking in the traditional classroom, which increases their opportunities to use language in a meaningful way and improve their language fluency. For example, by engaging in real-life tasks such as giving instructions in English, they will have more chances to interact and negotiate meaning with others.
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Project work promotes learners’ 21st-century learning skills:
critical thinking, creative thinking, communicating, and collaborating skills.
(1) Communication and collaboration skills: when working on projects, learners will need to work together. They need to listen to each other, provide their own input to the team and resolve conflicts when necessary. (Musa et al., 2011).
(2) Creative thinking skills: e.g., learners may need to innovate new designs or new ideas for projects to implement (Wijayati et.al, 2019).
(3) Critical thinking skills: when doing projects, learners learn to analyze and evaluate situations with a critical thinking lens. For example, they will need to ask questions and find solutions to solve the problem. (Haniah, & Setyaningsih, 2021).
Pedagogical challenges of project work
However, there are still some challenges existing in actual teaching process, as Brumfit (1984) mentioned.
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Lack of time and the lack of administrative flexibility of institutional timetabling
Projects can take a lot of time to plan, organize, and execute. This can be challenging for both teachers and learners who may have limited time， place and schedule available for additional activities outside of regular classroom work.
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Uneven participation and receptiveness of learners
Collaborative projects can be a great way to encourage communication and cooperation among learners, but it can also lead to uneven participation because of the receptiveness of learners, with some learners taking on a greater share of the work than others.
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Difficulty with assessment
Assessing project work can be challenging, as it can be difficult to quantify or measure the various skills and competencies involved. This can make it harder to evaluate learners’ progress and determine whether they have achieved the desired learning outcomes.
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Lack of teacher guidance for learner training
In some cases, learners may not have the necessary language skills or background knowledge to carry out a project effectively without sufficient guidance and support from their teacher.
Yeah, project works in foreign langugages can improve language learners’ use of language and thus improve their fluency. I think the fan community in the digital wilds is a good example of online projects hopeful for improving language fluency. Online fans will write fan fictions, set up and maintain fan websites, communicate with their international fellows and so on, during which they will investigate foreign languages’ cultures to ensure their language use is appropriate. So apart from language fluency, fan practices also improve language accuracy. Are there other popular online projects can greatly improve language practices?
I would say maybe there are also fan reaction videos. Despite many fan-remixing videos, I think the reaction videos are a good demonstration of online projects in which English learners can actively engage and learn the language, especially when fans with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds gather together and react to the same video. For example, they may share their opinions about the performance or the choreography by using English as their communicative medium to exchange ideas.
I agree with the editors that project work benefits English language learners in many aspects. Take my own English learning and online project working experience as an example, it allows me use English language in a very meaningful way to improve the fluency because project work gives me more opportunities to interact and negotiate meanings with others in English. In addition, project work promotes my critical thinking ability since I have to deal with a lot of Internet resources to sift through the information I need. However, there are challenges brought by the online enviroment, especially when it comes to ensuring effective engagement. We should think more strategies to cope with these challenges.
Amazing point! Project work can provide students with more opportunities to engage in active discussions, and provide peer feedback in a more meaningful way. In this circumstance, both their communication skills and problem-solving skills can be enhanced a lot.
It is true that project work in elf can contribute to language learners’ fluency and competency to some extent. But the precondition is that team members don’t share the same L1. Take text projects, for example. Usually, suppose the members share the same mother tongue, which is not English, when they discuss. In that case, they will prefer to use their first language so that the effectiveness of such projects will be weakened.
Hi Lulu, I strongly agree with your view. Learners’ mother language background plays a significant role in how project work goes. In addition, the benefits of project work in facilitating learners’ fluency and competence is evident. However, it also needs teachers’ good preparation in advance. In fact, in an exam-oriented context, teachers don’t have the patience to design project work for students. And they also lack enough systematic training on how to design, arrange and evaluate project work. By contrast, students should have more access to project work since what they need is more than just language competence but also communicative and cooperative skills.
In my observations, even students who share the same L1 can end up engaging with one another in the L2 in out of class contexts like WhatsApp group chats. It only takes one individual who is motivated to practice the L2 to have an influence on the whole group.
In response to the challenges mentioned, here are some potential strategies that I think teachers can use to overcome these pedagogical challenges in project-based learning:
1. Time Management and Flexibility: Teachers can plan the project in advance and ensure that it fits within the allotted time for the course. They can also be flexible with the schedule and make adjustments as needed to accommodate unexpected events or circumstances.
2. Promoting Equal Participation: Teachers can design projects that require equal participation from all group members, such as assigning specific roles or responsibilities for each learner. They can also monitor group dynamics and intervene if necessary to ensure that all learners are contributing equally.
3. Effective Assessment: Teachers can develop clear criteria for assessing the project and share them with learners in advance. They can also use a combination of formative and summative assessments to evaluate learners’ progress and provide feedback throughout the project.
4. Teacher Guidance and Support: Teachers can provide learners with the necessary guidance and support to carry out the project effectively, such as providing resources and materials, clarifying objectives and expectations, and giving feedback on learners’ work. Teachers can also scaffold learners’ learning by breaking down complex tasks into smaller, more manageable steps.
These are just some general ideas coming to my mind, so they are not perfect or even may not be effective. Hope to hear more suggestions from you guys!
Thanks for your useful strategies. I think they can give teachers some direction for better designing the project work. But I still think some of them are a bit generalized. See, we all know should plan in advance, set clear criteria, and give necessary guidance. But how can we fit them into real context is still ambiguous. I think most of the techniques still require teachers’ high competencies and expertise to adapt to the changing conditions through the project.
Those kinds of activities integrate language knowledge and other comprehensive qualities to achieve a practice-oriented assignment. By doing so, both language proficiency and other transferrable skills can be improved, which may further help students in finding personal interests, enriching experiences and so on. I once participated in a project work on translation whose final aim is to provide Chinese scripts for public announcements on the website of Vestal Central School district in New York State, America. The project imitates authentic translation projects’ personnel distribution (manager, translator, reviser, client) and provides opportunities to get in touch with real clients (school staff and students’ parents). The whole process leaves me with a deep impression of authentic project experience, language usage in a real context and the importance of cooperative skills.
But when it comes to integrating group work into classrooms, it needs much more consideration on how to ensure each students’ participation, how to ensure the relatively equal distribution of tasks, how to ensure the students’ focus on the task, how to ensure the fairness and effects of assessment rubric, how to organize the process of the project in a suitable way and so on. It indeed requires teachers’ preconceived design and students’ strong willingness to make sure the projects’ smooth proceeding.
BTW, I think in mainland China, these kinds of group work are suitable for the university as teachers have high autonomy in their curriculum design unlike teachers from primary school to high school, during which teachers have strict syllabi to follow, students have several subjects to handle with at the same time and probably have reluctant attitudes on spending too much time in finishing one project.
Agreed. And also teachers need to assign the suitable group size If it’s too large, the free riding problem might exist, and the students who happen to be passengers may not learn anything.
Although different projects will offer various settings for learning English, project work does have some effect on developing English fluency and how to use projects appropriately in appropriate scenarios. For instance, medical projects can help students’ understanding of medical English, while movie-related items can help students’ vocabulary. I believe that in order to broaden their knowledge, students should study a variety of subjects.
As the student upstairs said, in mainland China, English teaching is often needed to be organized according to a detailed schedule, as in the mainland education system, teaching is test-oriented, so there is hardly any room for teachers to take project work into practice. Even if they could, the parents of the students would doubt its effect and deny the usefulness of project work if it does not produce excellent results in the short term. How to solve this problem has always been a question for me. Do you have any solutions?
I strongly agree that lack of time is one of the reasons why project work is not widely applicable, especially for primary and secondary school teaching. But project work has many advantages, including allowing students access to authentic language materials, developing students’ communication and collaboration skills and cultivating students’ critical thinking ability. As for how to use project work to assist teaching in primary and secondary schools, perhaps we can assign more pair work or group work with simple procedures to students. For example, take two people as a group, read a short passage and make a hand-copied newspaper. It is hoped that more and more project work will appear in the teaching of primary and secondary schools in the future.
The project work is obviously of great help to students’ English learning. Students can choose the projects they want to do according to their interests and strengths, which can improve their learning enthusiasm. In addition, the project work emphasizes group cooperation, and students can broaden their horizons in the process of communicating with others.
Although project work has done well in arousing students’ enthusiasm for learning, as mentioned in the article, the difficulty of assessment indeed makes the project work restricted to implementation. Most of the students may participate in project work energetically and relaxed; but if teachers introduce specific grading rubrics, students will pay much more attention to the grading rules than to the project itself. But of course, we can’t do an academic project without grading rubrics, because a mark and credit are the most intuitive way to show one’s contribution and effort in the project.