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Supplement 2. Guidelines on Projects as Formats of Independent Studies Activities.

(compiled by L.I.Serdyukova)

Preview.

In terms of education the word ‘project’ means ‘a piece of school or college work in which students do their own research and present the results: My class is doing a project on the First World War’. (1:926)

Undergraduates carry out two projects per semester as part of their faculty language course. Thus in the 9^th semester 11 hours are allotted to the teaching profession theme “Textbooks/ Teaching Materials: Evaluation, Selection, Adaptation, Design”. And 4 hours are given to the language and style of emotive literature theme “The Readers’ Theatre of the 9^th semester outside reading book” or “A Critical Review of the 9^th semester outside reading book”.

Similarly, in the 10^th semester undergraduates do 2 projects. The first one is on the social and cultural theme “Diversities and Similarities in the Modern World” taking 9 hours. The second one refers to the Language and Style of Emotive Literature theme “Poetry in the Communicative Classroom” taking 4 hours to carry out. Alternatives to the second theme may be “The Readers’ Theatre of the 10^th Semester Home Reading Book/ A Critical Review of the 10^th Semester Home Reading Book”.

In the light of the communicative approach to ELT projects are treated as vehicles for:

• empowerment of learners and teachers;
• producing true message-focus (“preoccupation with meaning”);
• facilitating negotiated interaction between participants;
• giving learners the opportunity to develop strategic competence through participating in meaningful interaction (2:230; 241-249.3: 68-73.4: 2-9; 37).

The target language (i.e. English) is to be the language both of the final product and of the process by which it is prepared. The ultimate purpose of the projects is improving spoken fluency through intensive group work in a supportive atmosphere.

Each project involves spending two hours a week for the allotted number of weeks doing some kind of project work in a specified area with the assistance of the teacher, working towards a real-world outcome.

At the end of the semester the participants in each subgroup present results from their projects to the entire group – some other group – the whole course – in a collective feedback session.

Along the way the undergraduates are encouraged to cultivate a morality of cooperation, learned through interaction with other participants of the project and a developing sense of mutual respect.

Notes

1. See Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English. A.S.Hornby. OUP, 1995.
2. See Power Pedagogy and Practice. Editors Tricia Hedge and Norman Whitney. OUP, 1997.
3. See Encyclopedic Dictionary of Applied Linguistics. Ed. by Keith Johnson and Helen Johnson. Blackwell Publishers, 1999. (Room 30: American Studies and Teaching English Resource Centre).
4. See Project Work. A Means to Promote Language Content. By F.L.Stoller. English Teaching Forum, October 1997.

The Framework of Projects’ Procedures in the 9^th Semester.

Theme 1: “Textbooks/ Teaching-Learning Materials: Evaluation, Selection, Adaptation, Design”.

The project takes approximately 5 weeks to go through the process to the final product, for example November 10 – December 13, 2003.

The term “textbook” is used in the broad sense of “an organized and pre-packaged set of teaching/ learning materials”. The materials may be bound in just one book or distributed in a package such as the familiar course-book, workbook, teacher’s guide, and cassettes. Thus the term “textbook” would encompass both the individual book and the package.

Learners examine selected textbooks having as their objective the production of information on them and suggestions for the textbooks’ users. A central feature of the projects should be to help undergraduates, would-be-teachers, become better consumers of textbooks by teaching them how to select and use textbooks properly, exploit them in the class and adapt and supplement them where necessary.