Курсовая работа: Project Work in Teaching English

Asia: Bangladesh, Brunei, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, Pakistan, Singapore, Sri Lanka

Australia and the Pacific: Australia, Fiji, New Zealand, Tonga

The Americas: Canada, The United States, Belize, many of the Caribbean islands, including The Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Puerto Rico,St Lucia, St Vincent, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, the Falkland Islands

3. Explain to the class that you want them to do a project on one of these countries but not on England or the United States. Tell the class to form groups of three or four. Let your students choose their partners, while making sure no individuals get left out. Ask each group to choose a country. Allow more than one group to work on the same country – they often use quite different approaches and present interestingly different work – but you may decide you want your students to do different work on as broad a range of countries as possible, in which case they should all choose different countries.

4. When your students have chosen their countries, ask each group, for your reference, to give you a piece of paper with the names of the members in their group and which country they are going to work on.

5. Establish with the class the following:

a) how much you want each student to contribute to the project;

b) the content - set an upper limit of one third dedicated to the general background (geography and history, currency, industries, etc.) and insist that the greater part should be dedicated to the use of the English language, e.g. the role of English, how it differs fromstandard British/American English, periodicals published in English, literature, etc. The possible areas of focus here vary considerably from country to country and you may need to discuss with each group those areas that would offer the most potential, e.g. the question of language variety is more appropriate where most or all of the population is English-speaking, the periodicals published in English are more relevant where English is one of the many languages used in the country;

c) the deadline by which the project must be handed in.

6. Discuss with your students what sources of information they are going to use. Students work mostly from five sources:

a) encyclopedia entries;

b) books;

c) newspaper and magazine articles;

d) computer programs;

e) information from embassies, high commissions and tourist offices.

You may be able to provide support from material you yourself possess - this is where it is useful to have a list of groups and their countries, so that you know who to give it to.

CONCLUSIONS

The objectives of the paper were to highlight the importance of the project work in teaching English, to discover how it influences the students during the educational process and if this type of work in the classroom helps to learn the language.

On the basis of the literary sources studied we can come to the following conclusions that project work has advantages like the increased motivation when learners become personally involved in the project; all four skills, reading, writing, listening and speaking, are integrated; autonomous learning is promoted as learners become more responsible for their own learning; there are learning outcomes -learners have an end product; authentic tasks and therefore the language input are more authentic; interpersonal relations are developed through working as a group; content and methodology can be decided between the learners and the teacher and within the group themselves so it is more learner-centred; learners often get help from parents for project work thus involving the parent more in the child's learning; if the project is also displayed parents can see it at open days or when they pick the child up from the school; a break from routine and the chance to do something different.

The disadvantages of project work are the noise which is made during the class, also projects are time-consuming and the students use their mother tongue too much, the weaker students are lost and not able to cope with the task and the assessment of projects is very difficult. However, every type of project can be held without any difficulties and so with every advantage possible.

The types of projects are information and research projects, survey projects, production projects and performance and organizational projects which can be performed differently as in reports, displays, wall newspapers, parties, plays, etc.

Though projectwork may notbe the easiest instructional approach to implement, the potential pay-offs are many. At the very least, with the project approach, teachers can break with routine by spending a week or more doing something besides grammar drills and technical reading.

The organization of project work may seem diff