Бартіш Г.В.

ЛІБС УБС НБУ

Benefits of the project work

Teaching and learning a foreign language, especially English for specific purposes, is without doubt, an increasingly more important in today’s world due to the high level of scientific – technical and large social and economic changes of the environment in which it operates.

Foreign language teaching in general has turned the focus on the teacher to the student-centered approach, along with the need to promote the latter’s effort towards the development of autonomy, which has proven to be a new challenge for the teacher, so it is necessary to develop new ways to support student work around a method to help them improve what they do.

For this, we must begin from the understanding, properly based, how the activity carried out by students is related to the different dimensions of teaching – educational process and how it links with the environment in which the activity occurs.

The methodology used allowed the systematization of information related to the project work method and its advantages and educational characteristics.

The term project can be defined as a set of activities seeking to develop a coordinated manner among themselves, in order to solve a particular problem within a given period of time.

The project work method is appropriate in contexts where students have significant freedom to determine the ways that address the tasks of work and where they are forced to play an important role in the direction of their own learning and through its preparation can answer the needs that students develop different language skills.

One of these is the writing needs of students, which are limited to a set of sentences inserted at many tables, charts and graphs, and through a project developed in English, can build skills such as grammatical accuracy which is so important and allowing fully understand the context of student work .It is clear that if the student does not learn to write before graduating, he never has the opportunity to learn after graduation.

The method of project work allows students to learn through the use of language and meaningful interactive situations also possible to develop communicative competence, that is, to understand and produce appropriate discourse in the field they study.

This method focuses on language taking into account the form, meaning and context, or is based on logic and in the context that has been used for teaching foreign languages and has been combined with student-centered learning to meet the needs of this.

In this method, the activities of language classes are specific to the topic under discussion, and students are encouraged to think and learn through the use of language. In foreign language classes for students project work permits to use their wealth of knowledge and the level of creative assimilation. It motivates and makes the results obtained allow the creative professional help sought.

The use of this method provides the following benefits:

* 1. The materials are organized by theme, as this is easier to remember and learn.

* 2. The reporting should be consistent and significant, which characterizes the good organization of content, enabling deep processing and better learning.

* 3. Motivation and interest of the students are related, and this is a challenge for the students’ skills of information processing.

* 4. The expectation for the development of the topic arises when students have been investing their knowledge in a sequence of tasks that are in progress, which is absent in the colloquial language and emphasis in scientific language.

* 5. The student is the center, while the teacher plays an important role in offering support and guidance throughout the process.

* 6. The work is done more cooperative than competitive, as students work in different ways: individually, teams or the entire group to complete the project, sharing resources, media, ideas, expectations, etc.

* 7. The integration of skills and information processing from various sources is closely related to real life.

* 8. The project ends with the presentation of work, may be oral, poster, newsletter, report, or an exhibition, either individually or collectively (the project’s value lies not only in the final product, but also in various stages of completion)

* 9. It is potentially motivating, challenging, invigorating and challenging the implementation of projects and, generally, is the result of independent and autonomous work of students and includes language skills, knowledge and cognitive skills learned.

When you combine the skills and language skills, arguments arise advantageous for the project work, and allows the incorporation of explicit language skills in addition to meeting the language needs of students through context.

Education through the development and discussion of projects should be seen as a vehicle to integrate fully, skills and content, that allow working extensively with the English language for specific purposes. Project development allows the development of interactive capability of the students.

For this type of activity a set of rules that enable its implementation to be effective should be followed. They are:

* 1. The objective should be properly defined.

* 2. The activity which promotes development of communication and student performance to the level of creative assimilation of foreign language use should be determined.

* 3The adequate time for implementation should be provided.

* 4. Correct selection of the activity should be done.

* 5. Feedback for the activity in order to analyze whether it is successful or not.

The teaching process – learning English for specific purposes through the use of project work method can be developed for intensive or extensive methods, lasting several days or even weeks, and involves students in various activities outside the classroom.