HOW TO USE PROJECT WORK IN TEACHING ENGLISH.
методическая разработка по английскому языку (9 класс) на тему

How to create the atmosphere of tolerance and respect when doing a project work.

Маннапова Лилия Константиновна, учитель английского языка высшей квалификационной категории МБОУ «Гимназия № 125»

Советского района города Казани.

    Projects can help students to make their own choices about what they learn, involving different skills and promoting creativity. That is to say, project work is one of the effective ways to learn how to study in the atmosphere of tolerance and respect to each other in our multicultural world.

Why do I love Project work?

1. Projects encourage cooperation and sharing.
2. They promote learner independence.
3. Project work is topic-based.
4. It involves research / questionnaires
5. They lead to a presentation.
6. They involve different skills.
7. They may be very creative and include artwork.
8. They cater for different learning styles and personalities. 
9. They require use of all language skills.

         My favorite activity with my students of senior grades is the so called "method of projects". For one of my project works I've chosen the topic "My newspaper”.

 This project extends and supports students' creative writing skills by giving them the opportunity to write their own newspaper articles and stories.

My students’ level is Intermediate; age range is older adolescent, time - 6 academic hours.

          I put General aims as follows: 1/ to develop intensive and extensive reading skills, 2/to write newspaper articles based on the sample material.

Resources: Articles, samples of different sheet and tabloid newspapers written in English- The Times, The Guardian, may be downloaded from the Internet, if there are not any. To see how headlines are used, how different articles are structured, to see where advertisements appear.

I, myself, bought and collected English newspapers. And I asked the students to bring in copies of newspapers in Russian. I conducted the following activities:

          As I had difficulty with getting enough material for the whole group, I spread the samples around to get students to look at them, by walking around. Thus, they studied different kinds of newspapers-the layout, their political news, sport, culture,etc. Students scanned the headlines in order to select an article that sounds interesting. They also found the headlines difficult to understand. I pointed out that headlines rely on key words. Then I asked to look through the articles to get the gist and use dictionaries to read them in detail. After that  I asked the students to work in small groups to compare and discuss how the content of a newspaper is organized. I also asked the students to choose articles as models for their own version. And  I asked them to write articles at home, setting the deadline for completion. The students compiled their own newspapers collaboratively. I aimed each of the student to take responsibility for contributing different articles, to use different topics. Then I set a time for gathering, for bringing all the material together. And the newspaper was ready. We displayed it on the classroom walls. The students were impressed by the work done by them and missed the atmosphere of creativity, tolerance, mutual understanding, cooperation and enthusiasm in which they created this newspaper.

               The most important for me as a teacher were the following things: 1/my students were likely to  a lot of new words in the course of reading, that new lexics was incorporated into their own articles; 2/this kind of project make students work independently; 3/ some students were better than the others at looking up new vocabulary and those who were not so good, were not afraid of making mistakes, as they felt the great support of their team;4/ and the most valuable thing for me as a teacher is  that  with all projects, areal sense of achievement comes when displaying and sharing the END-product, in my case, a self-made  newspaper.

      Finally, I’d like to say, that all is fair in teaching. Every method used contributes to the achievement of the final goal of foreign language teaching - to be able to organize communication. And I am sure, that living in a global world nowadays requires good communicative skills for sharing opinions, for achievement mutual understanding and world-wide progress in all spheres of life - politics, business, culture, economy, human relations. That is one of the effective ways to live in the atmosphere of tolerance and respect to each other in our multicultural world.