Making News: A Successful Example of Project-Based Learning

Project-based learning (PBL) recently has been favored by teachers using various adaptations throughout the world. The purpose of this article is to share the experience of developing language skills via a project called “Faculty Voice.” In this project, second-year students of English, worked in groups as news editors to produce news; the traditional classroom environment no longer existed. The teachers gave feedback and help when students faced problems with language and technology. All activities related to the learning process were required to cover all four macroskills. Proper criteria and rubrics were also set up for assessment. At the end of the term, changes were found not only language competence and attitude, but also in some important soft skills. The Need to Change Through the fast development of technology, the mass media has seen great progress in their effort to satisfy a large number of customers. From a linguistic and pedagogical view, the mass media have made a great contribution to both learning materials and learning methods. In addition to using news texts adjusted for student reading materials and listening extracts, the process of students “making news” by writing, producing, and presenting their own news broadcasts has been used as a technique for them to practice and acquire a foreign language. In the movement toward innovation in language teaching at the Foreign Languages Faculty at Thainguyen University in Vietnam, making news was undertaken as a project-based learning (PBL) technique for second-year English majors with the main aim of enhancing English competence among students and experimenting with a new way of learning and teaching. Formerly, teachers were encouraged to design their lessons in such a way that there needed to be a more communicative context for learners themselves to produce the language item after it was presented and control-practiced. This P-P-P (Present, Practice, and Produce) approach was seen as the core of communicative methodology and proved to be more effective than previous approaches. However, teaching and learning is always demanding work, and the P-P-P approach sometimes seemed inadequate. More tasks and activities needed to be integrated into the approach to create more student interaction and meaningful communication. In this age of internationalization, learners are in a more accessible world of learning, not limited to a forty-five-minute class with teachers as the only source of knowledge. The question for teachers is how to create an authentic task for students to learn and how to 1Language Education in Asia, 2012, 3(1), 96-105. http://dx.doi.org/10.5746/LEiA/12/V3/I1/A09/Diem Language Education in Asia, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2012 Diem Page 97 integrate students’ exposure to the language into the syllabus. Among sources of access to language after school, news programs or channels in the target language appear to be common. The application of PBL is not new at the faculty (Diem, 2009), but making news as a language task had not yet been done before at the university. Features of PBL According to Esch (1998), PBL starts with an idea of the final result. Students must investigate the topic, plan how to achieve the desired result, and manage problems that may arise, as they would in a real-world setting. While undertaking the project, students gain a specific set of content knowledge and skills. Thomas (2000), citing Bereiter & Scardamalia (1999), claimed that to be a PBL project, “the central activities of the project must involve the transformation and construction of knowledge. . .” and added that “if the central activities. . . represent no difficulty to the student or can be carried out with the application of already-learned information or skills, the project is an exercise, not a PBL project” (p. 4). Advantages of PBL PBL has become increasingly favored for its unique features in effectiveness and adaptability. The first outstanding advantage is its focus on content learning rather than on a specific language target. Another immediate benefit of PBL lies in its learner-centeredness. This student direction encourages students’ autonomy and creativity throughout the course of the project. More critically, “PBL projects do not end up at a predetermined outcome or take predetermined paths” (Thomas, 2000, p. 4). When students can pursue their own interests and become engaged in their own learning, they discover hidden capacities that are restrained in the traditional learning context and use this area of strengths to achieve at higher levels. As a result, student autonomy and learning responsibility are developed. Authentic integration of skills is also widely seen as a reason for PBL to be utilized. Learning in a real-life context, learners not only have authentic language input to develop their language competency, but also have opportunities to use other skills, such as those for IT, teamwork, critical thinking, and professional knowledge. The real-world connection gives students a “break from routine” (Gallacher, 2004, para. 2), as they can do something different beyond the classroom environment. This permits authentic assessment, involving the teacher and students, as well as real audiences to thoroughly assess students’ end product. Another feature of PBL is that it “accommodates and promotes collaboration among students, between students and the teacher, and ideally between students and other community members as well” (“Project Based Learning,” n.d., para. 6). Students learn to work in small groups that are more cooperative than competitive. Interpersonal relations are developed and gradually form the way students will work with others later in life. Finally, PBL enables students develop learning skills that will be useful beyond school. The News-Making Project After considering the abovementioned underpinnings and highlights, PBL was seen as a potential and practical approach and was chosen to be one of the major experiments for curriculum innovation. Participants The 35 intermediate-level participants were second-year full-time students at Thainguyen University. They were sampled by their own wish. These 35 students made up one class for this news project. The class met once a week for 3 periods (45 minutes per period) during the