Position Paper

NAMES:        SANDRA  LILIANA RODRIGUEZ OCAMPO

MARIA CILENA CUELLAR PEÑA

TASK, CONTENT AND PROJEC BASED

We as teachers should look for the best strategies and activities in our classroom in order to create meaningful class for our students. Working with project based is an effective method by which using tasks into the classroom, students can give solution to a problem that affects animals, people or environment. Students can investigate, explore and reflect on the situation with the teacher´s help as facilitator of the project, this method allows that through content students to obtain knowledge and the teacher can assess to students through rubrics. “Project work  has been described by a number of language educators, including Carter and Tomas (1986), Ferragattti and Carminati (1984), Fried-Booth (1982, 1986) Haines (1989), Legutke (1984-1985), Legutke and Thiel (1983) Papandreou (1994), Sheppard and Stoller (1995) and Ward (1988). Although each of these educators has approached project work from a different perspective, project work, in its various configurations, shares the following features:

1.    Project work focuses on content learning rather than on specific language targets. Real-world subject matter and topics of interest to students can become central to projects.

2.    Project work is students centered, though the teacher plays a major role in offering support and guidance throughout the process.

3.    Project work is cooperative rather than competitive. Students can work on their own, in small groups, or as a class to complete a project, sharing resources, ideas and expertise along the way.  

4.    Project work leads to the authentic integration of skills and processing of information from varied sources, mirroring real-life tasks.

5.    Project work culminates in and end product (e.g., an oral presentation, a poster session, a bulletin-board display, a report, or a stage performance) that can be shared with others, giving the project a real purpose.  The value of the project, however, lies not just in the final product but in the process of working toward the end point. Thus, project work has both a process and product orientation, and provides students with opportunities to focus on fluency and accuracy at different project-work stages.

6.    Project work is potentially motivating, stimulating, empowering, and challenging. It usually results in building student confidence, self-esteem, and autonomy as well as improving student´s language skills, content learning, and cognitive abilities.

According with our experience about of project based with children in 5^th grade, we can argument that working with project based is a motivating way for students learn about a real situation which affects them. For example students can work in a project adapted a problematic in the city such as drugs or if there is a contaminated river, students will try to clean and protect it.  Teacher using pre-task can explains new words or key words to students in order to prepare them for develop the tasks in an effective way. Students can count with the teacher´s support in order to help them with the project, but students should develop their own ideas and looking the right information about of their projects.

In conclusion, when a new project is planed is important a negotiation between teachers and students, they can work in meaningful project according with a real context that they live, students can work in project relational with environment, art, culture, education, social problems, festivities and any others important aspects that affect their society; the most important in the project is that students learning and the same time they are aware with the situation in their community. 

References

Richards JC &  Renandya, W (2002) Methodology in Language Teaching:  An anthology of Current Practice. USA. Cambridge University.

Morsund, David (2002) Project-based learning: Using Information Technology, 2nd edition, ISTE. ISBN 1-56484-196-0