USING PBL TO ENHANCE EFL SKILLS: A POSSIBILITY?

Anchalee ChayanuvatWalailak University

Nakhon Si Thammarat canchale@wu.ac.th

Reflections on Teaching

• What are your worries when you teach?

• What are the usual roles you take as a teacher?

What are your students’ expectations?

What do we want our students to learn?

• Learn how to learn (know how they can learn best)

• Develop a life-long learning approach.• Learn actively.• Practice the following skills:

– Communication Skills

– Problem analysing skills

– Literature review

– Hypothesizing

– Synthesizing

– Conceptualizing

What is PBL?

• Ideally, PBL can enhance:– Researching skills– Confidence to deal with new happenings

• PBL is a method of education in which the student is at the centre. In PBL, students themselves are to a large degree responsible for their own learning process. Students decide for themselves what they want to learn and have considerable control over the choice of literature.

PBL’s Rationale (based on PBL: Step by Step by Gino Camp, Angelique van het KAAR, Henk van de Mollen and Henk Schmidt, document of ERASMAS University)

• Learning by discussing problems has been proven to make the study material more interesting and challenging.

• Learning in context leads to a better transfer of the knowledge obtained.

• Research has shown that new knowledge is retained better when you make an effort to determine what you already know about the subject before you start learning. Activation of prior knowledge prepares your brain for the storage of new information.

PBL’s Rationale

• Research has also indicated that knowledge becomes more useful, easier to retrieve from memory and that it can be retained for longer periods of time if it is elaborated on. Elaboration of knowledge is an important activity.

• Studying is more structured when you know what you want to know. Formulating learning issues is important.

• In PBL, students select their own sources of information—being responsible of their own learning.

Quality Learning

• When someone learns out of his or her own willingness, learning has a better quality and is more sustainable.

• When learning is thoroughly enjoyed, it Is not a burden as often felt by many students.

• Dickinson (1987:9) believes that learning is a personal individual act.

Quality Learning

• Senge (1990:14) says one learns to be human.• Kolb (1984 in Kahonen, 1992, 16-17) says

quality learning is experiential learning.• Kahonen (1990:283) believes in reflection—

experience at deeper levels understanding and interpretation.

• Mezirow et al (2000:3) states that learning is an interpretation of one’s experience using prior interpretation to guide future action.

Quality Learning

• Learning is a process through which one changes, both behaviourally and mentally. The cause of this change is experience. This experience is in turn influenced by power of reflection.

• These three words—experience, interpretation and reflection indicate that successful learners reflect all the time.

Quality Learning

• As we all know, learning never occurs as a result of teaching (Ormrod, 1995:250). Thus, it is important to give students some freedom to explore on their own.

• Literature in the field confirms the value of self-directedness.

• Bailey (1983) mentions serious competition among learners but cooperative learning may help solve the problem (Crandall, 1999).

Assumptions about Learning

• Learning is the interaction of a variety of factors: the learner, the teacher, the curriculum, peers and the experiences that learners have gone through.

• Learners themselves play a key role in the process of learning. To be successful, they should be autonomous and be in control of their learning processes.

What are students expected to achieve in a PBL curriculum?

• Graduates in PBL are said to be better than colleagues educated in traditional curricula to :

• Solve problems in their area of expertise.• Cooperate with others• Chair a meeting• Work independently and plan their work.• Find information independently and make

use of different sources.

What are teachers expected to do in a PBL Curriculum?

• Facilitates

• Caring for students

• Encouraging students to learn on their own

Class Types in PBL

• 1. Lectures

• 2. Small group tutorials

• 3. Lab sessions/ skills labs

• 4. Study Trips

• 5. Role plays

• 6. Panel discussions by experts

• 7. Support for individuals

The Seven Jumps (Steps)

• 1. Clarify unfamiliar terms

• 2. Problem Definition

• 3. Brainstorming

• 4. Problem Analysis

• 5. Formulate Learning Issues

• 6. Self-study

• 7. Reporting

Explanations• Clarify terms—dealing with difficult vocabulary• Discuss the problem and decide what

phenomena need to be explained• Seek explanations, formulate possible

explanations and explore the groups’ existing knowledge

• Summarize and identify what knowledge is lacking for the phenomenon to be explained

• Formulate learning goals• Self-study• Bring back the knowledge to the group. Explain

by going back to the problem. Evaluate.

The significance of a problem in PBL

• A problem is a description of a realistic situation that contains one or more phenomena in need of explanation.

Nu Picha Suffering at WU

• Nu Picha came from a village school in a remote area. She could not read nor write nor understand spoken

English. When she came to Walailak University for the first time, she tried to escape using English in the classroom

and got away each time. She did not attend many classes and she didn’t care. Nu Picha has a boyfriend from high school, also studying at Walailak University. Now they moved to Kum Sawad to live together. She never did assignments. No one could help her pass the exams

although she got some class marks for group assignments that she didn’t do, she got an F in English in the first term and felt upset about it. That made her want to give up on

English forever. It will not make her or her family any better. On the other hand, she doesn’t want to be retired

as she is the hope of her parents.

Can PBL be used to teach English?

• What do you think?

Let’s get into a demonstration.

Time for questions.

THANK YOU

References

The list of references is in your handout.