Promoting Collaborative Learning Using Project-based Approach.

Abstract

Nowadays, students present problems at the moment of working in groups for developing any task assigned by the teacher during the class. They tend to work just with the people, who the majority of the time are their friends. Also, when they are working in groups, students do not express their ideas freely, because they feel afraid of being embarrassed by their partners and when they do it, their ideas and opinions are not respected. Besides this, students tend to be individualist and prefer to work alone, since they think that it is much better and learn more working in this way. That is why, this qualitative research study carried out at Prado Veraniego School and with eighth graders students aimed at determining if PBL engages students to work collaboratively in the EFL classes. There were thirty-four participants in this study. All of them between the ages of thirteen to fifteen years. In order to achieve the objective of the present study, a class project that involved group work during the EFL classes for creating a magazine was planned.