hics, photography, filming and use of digital media. However, their retention of anything they had written in the process was very poor. Had my colleague found ways to recycle at least a core set of vocabulary and grammar structures she would have obtained a great artefact whilst enhancing her students’ target language vocabulary and structural repertoire.
At the very outset of the project, on communicating to the students the project brief, teachers should be clear about the linguistic goals of the projects. Obviously, it is crucial to set realistic linguistic goals for the learners, as in PBL it is not rare to see students work at linguistic levels which are way beyond their current level of language competence.
- Plan for the integration of ALL 4 macro-skills and embed grammar and communicative functions
This point refers to another potential issue with PBL, the fact, that is, that often the medium one chooses for the project kind of drives the way the students process the language. Hence, if one decides to produce a movie to answer the big question that the project is meant to address, the students involved may simply focusing on writing a script and reading it aloud. However, as language teachers, we have the ethical imperative to forge a balanced linguist who is versed fairly equally in all four skills. Hence, teachers need to plan carefully for the integration of all four skills in the project.
As I have already pointed out in a past blog on digital learning, speaking and listening are indeed the two areas of linguistic competence that are usually neglected the most. Curriculum designers and teachers working in the PBL paradigm need to ensure that these two important macro-skills are not neglected in the process.
- Minimize ‘digital manipulation’ in the actual lesson
As I have already discussed extensively in previous posts (e.g. “Six useless things foreign language teachers do”), excessive ‘digital manipulation’ which occurs concurrently with language processing is likely to cause divided attention and will, consequently, impede learning. This is particularly the case with pre-intermediate to lower-intermediate learners. This phenomenon is due to the limited channel capacity of learners’ Working Memory who cannot attend simultaneously to various cognitively challenging tasks. Most ‘digital manipulation’ (e.g. App smashing) ought to be done by students outside lesson time, unless the presence of the teacher is absolutely necessary and the disruption to learning is deemed to be ‘minimal’.
- Emphasize language acquisition as the main goal of the project
The concern for the attainment of a well-manufactured finished product that PBL often – but not always – entails does on many occasions hijack the focus of the lesson away from the ultimate goal of MFL teaching, which is target language acquisition. This needs to be in the teachers and students’ focal awareness throughout the process, and tactics must be implemented to verify that each lesson is actually enhancing learner target language proficiency; hence, formative assessment must permeate the whole process and summative assessment needs to be implemented, too, at key moments. After all, PBL should be about the language and skills that are learnt in the process of carrying out the project, not about the final product.
- Make sure everyone in the group contributes
When PBL is carried out in groups some students often complain, at the end of the project, that not everyone contributed equally. It may be useful to require the students to keep a journal in which they must, at the end of each lesson, log in, in as much detail as possible, the extent of their contributions to the team’s effort. In my experience this is an effective way to scaffold fair and effective collaboration, especially if the journal is taken into account in the final evaluation.
- Control for unethical behavior
In this day and age, a lot of PBL will be conducted using the Internet. This increases the risk of plagiarism and online-translator use. At the outset of my past PBL experiences, I asked my 