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Project can consist of intensive activities which take place over a short period of time, or extended studies which may take up one or two hours a week for several weeks [7, 7].
Project work gives the students an opportunity to bring their knowledge, feelings, experience, ideas and intelligence of their world into the school and out of it – to the area where the project work take place. Projects can include a wide range of the topics and use knowledge and experience gained from the other subjects in the curriculum.
In big classes, it is difficult for the teacher to make contact with the students at the back and it is difficult for the students to ask for and receive individual attention. It may seem impossible to organise dynamic and creative teaching and learning sessions. In large classes, pair-work and group-work play an important part since they maximise student participation.
When teachers know how their students feel about pair-work and group-work it is easier to decide what method should be applied and what kind of the activities to perform.
MI theory stands for “Multiple intelligences”, a concept introduced by the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner. In his book Frames of Mind, he suggested that as humans we do not possess a single intelligence, but a range of intelligences (Gardner 1983). He listed seven of these. (Appendix 1)
All people have all of these intelligences, he said, but in each person one (or more) of them is more pronounced. If teachers accept that different intelligences predominate in different people, it suggests that the same learning task may not be appropriate for all of students.
Pair Work at Project Lessons
Organizing pupils into pairs is an important job for the teacher at the project lesson. In pair work students can practise the language together, study a text, research the language or take part in information-gap activities. They can write dialogues, predict the content of reading texts, or compare on what they have listened to or seen.
The most important advantages and disadvantages of using pair work at project lessons saw S. Haines (1995).
So, the positive sides are:
It dramatically increases the amount of speaking time any one student gets in the class.
It allows students to work and interact independently without the necessary guidance of the teacher, thus promoting learner independence.
It allows teachers time to work with one or two pairs while the other students continue working.
It recognises the old maxim that ‘two heads are better than one’, and in promoting cooperation helps the classroom to become a more relaxed and friendly place. If teachers get students to make decisions in pairs, they will be allowed to share responsibility rather than having to bear the whole weight themselves.
It is relatively quick and easy to organise.
There are disadvantages of pair-work:
Pair-work is frequently very noisy and some teachers and students dislike this. Teachers in particular worry that they will lose control of their class.
Students in pairs can often veer away from the point of an exercise, talking about something else completely, often in their first language.
2.2 Group Work at Project Lessons
It is also possible to put students in large groups too, since this will allow them to do a range of tasks for which pair-work is not sufficient or appropriate. Thus, students can write a group story or role-play a situation which involves five or six people. They can prepare a presentation or discuss an issue and come to a group decision. Students can watch, write or perform a video sequence; teachers can give individual students in a group different lines of a poem which the group has to reassemble.
In general it is possible to say that small groups of around five students provoke greater involvement and participation than large groups. They are small enough for real interpersonal interaction, yet not so small that members are over-reliant upon each individual. Because five is an odd number, it means that a majority view can usually prevail. However, there are occasions when large groups are necessary. The activity may demand it, or we may want to divide the class into teams for some game or preparation phase.
Advantages and disadvantages of using group-work at project lessons are nicely described by J. Reid (1987), and T. Woodward (1995) in their works. The main advantages are:
Unlike pair-work, because there are more than two people in the group, personal relationships are usually less problematic; there is also a greater chance of different opinions and varied contribution than pair-work, and yet is more private than work in front of the whole class.
It promotes learner autonomy by allowing students to make their own decisions in the group without being told what to do by the teacher.
Like pair work, it dramatically increases the amount for individual students.
There are definite disadvantages, too:
It is likely to be noisy. Some teachers feel that they lose control, and the whole-class feeling which has been painstakingly built up may dissipate when the class is split into smaller entities. Groups can take longer to organise than pairs.
In conclusion it should be mentioned that project work is topic-based which involves research/questionnaires project encourage cooperation and sharing, it may be very creative artwork.
While project work it is possible to use such forms of class organization as pair and group work. It helps for developing all language skills at the project lessons.
3 Using Project Work for Developing All Language Skills
Generally teaching aims in foreign languages methodologists tend to divide into some parts – structures, functions, vocabulary, pronunciation and skills.
There are three skills teachers are supposed to master in learning a new language:
they must learn to read it;
they should learn to understand it when they hear it;
they should learn to speak it.
Most modern school curricula require all subjects to encourage initiative, independence, self-discipline, imagination, development of all language skills, so the project work is a way of turning such general aims into practical classroom activity and involve children into teaching process [6, 119].
Project provides a natural context in which these separate parts can be re-integrated in learners’ minds. This is important for students to be sure about their own abilities to use target language in real situations. It is student’s own interests to produce language that is accurate and fluent.
Teachers and students encourage that projects break the routine. Project work demands creature and a lot of enthusiasm for both- teachers and learners.
Project work is very effective method because:
themes and target tasks for project learning derived from all forms and objects of life;
learners are involved with the ideas through a process of discussion, experimentation, reflection, and application of insights to the new stages of experimentation.
For planning the structure of project work students and teacher make sure about every pupil’s responsibilities. During the project students practise in main language skills – listening, speaking, reading and writing.
3.1 Developing Reading and Listening Skills
Reading and listening are receptive skills.
Reading is not a passive skill. It is an incredibly active occupation. To do it successfully, we have to understand what the words mean, see the picture, the words are painting, understand the arguments and work out of we agree with them.
When we read a text in our own language, we frequently have a good idea of the content before we actually read. Book covers give us a hint of what is in the book, photographs and headline hint at what articles are about and reports look like reports before we read a single word. Teachers should give students “hints” so that they can predict what is coming too. It will make them better and more engaged readers.
There are many reasons why getting students to read English texts which is an important part of the teacher’s job. In the first place, many of them want to be able to read texts in English either for their careers, for study purposes or simply for pleasure.
A balance has to be struck between real English on one hand and the students’ capabilities and interest on the other. There is some authentic written material which beginner students can understand to some degree: menus, timetables, sings and basic instructions, for example, and, where appropriate, can be used in project work. But for longer prose, teachers may want to offer their students texts which, while being like English, are nevertheless written or adapted especially for their level. The important thing is that such texts are as much like real English as possible [6, 86].
Listening is a skill and any help students can be offered, in performing that skill will help them be better listeners. Listening to tapes is a way of bringing different kinds of speaking into the classroom, it is possible to play different kinds of tape to them, e.g. conversation, “plays”, interviews, stories read aloud, telephone exchanges etc.
One of the main reasons for getting students to listen to spoken English is to let them hear different varieties and accents – rather than just the voice of their teacher with its own idiosyncrasies. In today’s world, they need to be exposed not only to one variety of English (British English, for example) but also to varieties such as American English, Australian English, Indian English or West African English. [6,124].
The debate about use of authentic listening material is just as fierce in listening as it is in reading. If, for example, teachers play a tape of a political speech to complete beginners, they will not understand a word. If, on the other hand, students are given a realistic (though not authentic) tape of a telephone conversation, they may learn to gain confidence as a result. Everything depends on level, and the kind of tasks that go with a tape.
There may be some authentic material which is usable by beginners such as pre-recorded announcements, telephone messages, etc.
There are numbers of ways in which listening activities differ from otter classroom exercises: firstly, tapes go at the same special for everybody.
Listening is special, too, because spoken language, especially when it is informal, has a number of unique features including the use of incomplete utterances, repetitions, hesitation, etc., experience of informal spoken English together with an appreciation of other spoken factors – the tone of the voice, the intonation the speakers use, rhythm, and background noise – will help students tease meaning out of such speech phenomena.
3.2 Developing Speaking and Writing Skills
Speaking and writing are the productive skills. Production processes control how well the child can reproduce the model’s responses.
There are three basic reasons why it is a good idea to give students speaking tasks which provoke them to use all and any language at their command:
1. Rehearsal: getting students to have a free discussion gives them a chance to rehearse having discussion in project work.
2. Feedback: speaking tasks where students are trying to use all and any language they know provides feedback for both teacher and students. Teacher can see how well their class is doing and what language problems they are having (that is a good reason for project lessons); students can also see how easy they find a particular kind of speaking and what they need to improve.
3. Engagement: good speaking activities can and should be highly motivating. Many speaking tasks (role-playing, discussion, problem-solving) can be used in the project work [6, 88]
There are four types of speaking activity:
information- gap
survey
discussion
role-play
One popular information-gap activity is called “Describe and Draw”. It has many of the elements of an ideal speaking activity.
One way of provoking conversation and opinion exchange is to get students to conduct questionnaires and surveys. If the students plan these questionnaires themselves, the activity becomes even more useful.
Role-play activities are those where students are asked to imagine that they are in different situations and act accordingly. Teachers can organise discussion sessions in their classroom, too.
Writing is a basic language skill, just as important as speaking, listening, and reading. Students need to know how to write letters, how to put written reports together, how to reply to advertisement – and increasingly, how to write using electronic media. Part of teacher’s job is to give students that skill.
There are four writing sequences:
postcard
altering dictation
newspaper headlines/articles
report writing [6,81-83]
Another factor which can determine teacher’s choice of writing task is the students’ interests. Teacher’s decisions, though, will be based on how much language the students know, what their interests are, and what teacher thinks will not only be useful for them but also motivate them as well.
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