THE AFFECT OF PROJECT-BASED ACTIVITIES ON EFL LEARNERS’ SPEAKING SKILLS

Abstract

Mainly, the criteria among people for someone whether s/he knows a language or not is his adequacy to speak that language. A huge percentage of students attend second-language courses because they want to learn how to speak the language. However, unfortunately, a majority of them cannot or will not be able to do it at the end. The matter for those students is that they may be prosperous in linguistic activities carried out in the classroom, but once outside, they cannot use what they have learnt. Therefore, what can be done to achieve real life communication in a language class room? The purpose of our study was to find out how far Project-based activities affected the speaking skills of the Preparatory Class intermediate level students in the Department Of English Language Teaching at Necmettin Erbakan University. Semi-Structured Interview and Focus Group Discussion was carried out for the 14 participants who attended the classes for one academic term. As the study was Qualitative, Content Analysis was used to analyze the data. The results showed that Project-based activities contributed a lot to the participants’ level of spoken fluency and hindered their anxiety to some extent.

Keywords

• Speaking skills
• project-based learning
• preparatory class
• higher education

PROJE TABANLI FAALİYETLERİN EFL ÖĞRENCİLERİNİN KONUŞMA BECERİLERİNE ETKİSİ

Öz

Temel olarak, insanlar için bir dilin bilip bilinmediğinin ölçütü, o dilin konuşma yeterliliğidir. Öğrencilerin büyük bir yüzdesi dili nasıl konuşacaklarını öğrenmek istedikleri için ikinci dil kurslarına katılıyorlar. Fakat, ne yazık ki, çoğunluğu sonunda bu isteklerini gerçekleştiremiyorlar. Bu öğrencilerin asıl problemi, sınıfta yürütülen dil faaliyetlerinde başarılı olmalarına rağmen dışarı çıktıkları an öğrendiklerini kullanamamalarıdır. Bu nedenle, bir dil sınıfı atmosferinde gerçek yaşam iletişimini sağlamak için neler yapılabilir? Çalışmamızın amacı, Proje-temelli aktivitelerin Necmettin Erbakan Üniversitesi İngilizce Öğretmenliği bölümündeki hazırlık sınıfı orta seviye öğrencilerinin konuşma becerilerini ne kadar etkilediğini bulmaktı. Bir akademik dönem boyunca derslere katılan 14 katılımcı için Yarı Yapısal Görüşme ve Odak Grup Tartışması yapılmıştır. Çalışma Nitel olduğundan, verilerin analizinde İçerik Analizi kullanılmıştır. Sonuçlar, Proje-bazlı faaliyetlerin katılımcıların sözlü akıcılık düzeyine oldukça katkıda
bulunduğunu ve kaygılarını bir ölçüde engellediğini göstermiştir

Anahtar Kelimeler

• Konuşma becerileri
• proje-temelli öğrenme
• hazırlık sınıfı
• yükseköğrenim

Kaynakça

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