Nancy Cervantes Tinoco

Drafting a project proposal

Classroom context
Escuela Preparatoria Oficial Anexa a la Normal No. 1 de Nezahualcóyotl, is a public high school on
the east of the State of Mexico. The groups are formed by 55 male and female students between the
age of 15 to 18. The student’s English level is between no English knowledge and A2 according to
the English in the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR).

To implement a Project Based Learning Project in class, the curriculum is considered as well as the
learning core curriculum while working on the project. On the second semester, the English
curriculum states that one of the grammar topics is the use of present modal verbs (must, mustn’t,
have to, not have to, should, should not). The project is to be integrated and corresponding to the
purpose of the unit along with the unit learning content, the process and product answer to the
curriculum, in this case the purpose of the unit is to formulate instructions, orders, suggestions, and
prohibitions through communicative skills within a situation recognizing the cultural diversity of
the context. The time assigned to this task is approximately of 4 weeks with three hours work a
week.

Objective
To create a brochure where the students give recommendations, prohibitions, rules, and pieces of
advice about a place to visit in Mexico during holidays or vacations. During the process the students
develop soft skills such as teamwork, communication, listening skills and creative thinking by
doing research which requires the use of the four basic language skills.

Topic
Each team decides which aspects to include in their brochure about the place in Mexico to visit
during the holidays or vacations. Students create an attractive and creative brochure appealing to
tourists, travelers, or visitors.

Organization
Students organize teams according to their place of interest. Students will work outside the
classroom to gather information, do research, and get visual elements for their brochure.
In the classroom, students will gather to share the information to decide about the information to
use for the brochure. They will assign a person to be a secretary to take notes and write agreements,
a mediator to facilitate the negotiations and a representative to speak for the group.
Background information
What is a brochure?
The main purpose of a brochure is to extend the reader's knowledge on one specific topic in which
the brochure centers around. There are different types of brochures depending on what it is about.
In this project-based learning project students will make a brochure which does not talk about a
travel destination as a travel brochure which advertises a destination, sightseeing attraction, or tour
activities, but a brochure that talks about recommendations, prohibitions, rules, etc., in a place. The
purpose is not to inspire tourists to plan a trip but to educate about the place which they are visiting,
or they already have arrived.

Example of brochure

Advantages of a brochure
 It is a cost-effective method to provide information.
 Easily understandable by readers since it utilizes simple language to create awareness about
something.
 It is striking to the readers.
 Well-designed brochures take little time to capture the attention of clients.

Pre-task
Discuss the possible activities that the tourists carry out when visiting a place for vacation or
holidays. As they research, students take note of new vocabulary, and new verbs that are related to
activities described in the brochure.

Task Cycle
For the students to do their project, there are tasks that the students must resolve throughout the
process, in order to have a guide, Booth-Fried Booth argues that students use several steps for a
project beginning inside the classroom then moving out into the world and re-turning back to the
classroom. As cite in IEXPRO (n.d.), according to Vidal`s book Project Work Step By Step (1993),
in which each chapter corresponds to the stages of a project. As we see, they break down the stages
into 10 basic steps:
Step 1: Creating a good classroom atmosphere.
Step 2: Getting the class interested.
Step 3: Students and teacher structure the project.
Step 4: Creating a general outline of the Project.
Step 5: Doing basic research around a topic.
Step 6: Reporting to the class.
Step 7: Processing feedback
Step 8: Putting it all together
Step 9: Presenting the project.
Step 10: Assessing and evaluating the project

Classroom planning
Step 1. To give an introduction, teacher presents a context or problem to students. At the beginning,
to get the class interested, the teacher asks about student’s vacation experiences, the teacher
questions about good and bad experiences.
Teacher can ask questions:
 Do you go on vacation?
 Do you plan to go on vacation?
 Where do you go to?
 Who do you go with?
 Do you enjoy all your vacation or do you sometimes you have difficulties?
 What kind of difficulties do you encounter?
 Would you like someone to tell you how to avoid those difficulties?

Step 2. The teacher asks about what could be useful in order to go on vacations and have a good
experience and not worry about having a bad experience. The teacher guides students to recognize
what they are going to work with.
  Teacher can bring along some brochures to class to show to students.
 Teacher starts by leading the students to recognize the characteristics that a brochure has.
 Teacher asks if the brochure show any warnings about the places that are being advertised.
 Teacher asks if the brochures should include warnings or suggestions for certain places or
activities.

Carrying out the project

Step 3. Teacher makes questions regarding where people get information about traveling sites and
recommendation of activities. This activity is to stablish and clarify the context, problems, terms,
and concepts not understood at first moment.

Teacher asks for suggestions for different things in the places people go on vacation or holiday
while brainstorming and writing the information on the board:
 Travel destination
 Transportation
 Documentation
 Attractions
 Food
 Clothes
 Activities
 Sightseeing
 Prohibitions
 Dangers
 Must do’s

The purpose of this step is for students and teacher to agree or know the meaning of the various
words and terms and on the situation described, at this point students might encounter difficulties
has students need to know modal verbs of recommendation, suggestions, prohibitions, obligations,
and no obligations.
Step 4. The teacher and students define to whom is the brochure directed to, adults, children,
teenager, elders. Teacher asks students to decide the place which they are going to use for their
brochure. The teacher and students will also agree on the layout of the brochure and the content that
the brochure as a should have, as a minimum requirement. Moreover, teacher negotiate a deadline
for project completion or in the teacher can set the date. Students, in this step, arrange the timing for
gathering, sharing, and compiling information, as well as the presentation of their final project.

Step 5. Students gather information that they obtained outside the classroom. Students bring into the
classroom. The teacher provides relevant content resources to get students started on their
information search, teacher suggests asking people who have been in vacations or their parents
about what they would have done different when a situation presented. Students may bring the
information in Spanish and in the classroom, they can make use of the grammar translation method
to get started with the information in English.
Students may get the information by:
 Going to official pages of tourism
 Asking family members about their experiences on vacations
 Going to travel agencies to get brochures about places to travel
 Go into social media about vacation experiences

Step 6. The teacher is aware of student language levels; in this case the teacher acknowledges the
students’ knowledge of the modal verbs to use in the brochure. If necessary, the teacher may review
the grammar topic and uses of modal verbs. The teacher may supply instructional activities for each
of the information-gathering tasks.

Reviewing and monitoring the work

Step 7. The teacher helps students to revise the language skills. Students analyze the information
they collected, some of the information may be discard, some may be kept, identifying the
information that is critical for the completion of their project. The teacher designs language-
improvement activities to help students successfully present the final outcome of their project,
focusing on grammar review and oral production.

Step 8. Students put their project together, students work in groups and organize the information
and how they are going to put it together into their brochure.
Step 9. Students present their project. Students must remember that they have to bring into class
resources that allow their classmates to visualize their work. Because it is a brochure it can be either
projected or do a tri-fold poster board.
Step 10. Teacher asks students to make co-evaluation on their classmates, while the teachers
provide students with feedback on their language and content learning.

Language Focus
According to the curriculum of Inglés II DGB, students are able to use the present simple tense,
present progressive tense, future simple and idiomatic future correctly in different context. To start
with the project students must research for the grammar references that helps give
recommendations, suggestions, prohibitions, obligations, etc., to help with the grammar point in the
brochure. The teacher will assign several activities to reenforce the grammar, writing and oral skills.

Teacher Roles
During the project-based learning project the teacher is expected to have different roles depending
on the activities, needs and goals that the teacher has:
 In this project-based learning project the teacher is a facilitator and a coordinator.
 The teacher connects to the need of the students, meaning that the teacher knows the
students individually.
 Based on the need of language learning the teacher can take other roles such as a
collaborator.
 The teacher must make a friendly and safe environment for all students to succeed.
 Teacher is a great communicator and listener.

Learner Roles
Students as well as teachers have different roles throughout the project-based learning process
depending on the stage of the task they are on.
 The student has to a student with realistic expectation and qualified to do the task, which is
assigned to, the student needs to have certain skills for a project-based learning such as
technical skills, interpersonal skills, communication skills and creative thinking skills.
 Student acts as a coach, seeking for help when needed, moreover the student inspires,
models and is willing to be part of a relationship of dialogue with the teacher.
 Student is a contributor, meaning that the student contributes with their own learning
experience and personal experiences.
 Student is a team member. He/she participates with the team and learns how to do
teamwork.
  Student is an academic scholar, meaning that the student learns the course content.

Difficulties With Implementing Project Work

Working with project-based learning projects can bring particular difficulties throughout the
process, in addition to the planning that we as teachers make every other time. More than only
being difficulties, they are challenges that related to us as teachers, to students with the curriculum,
among others.

Difficulties related to the teacher can be the decision of the topic or unit to work with and this might
be related to the fact that curriculum is not designed to be project-based learning, as well as the time
to be able to complete the project. Also, the number of students can be a struggle as if it is a big
group, it would be difficult to or harder for the teacher to be able to monitor the process in such
short time. In this particular project:
 As mentioned in the context, the group is about 55 students, the great number of students
which make it hard to monitor every team’s work.
 There are only three hours a week of class makes it difficult to complete a project.

Difficulties related to students can be more visible as it is a student-centered method. Students are
the main characters in the process. The personalities of the students may bring difficulties to the
group or teamwork dynamics, some students may take the role of being active in the project, other
may take a passive role in the team or others may want to be the leaders directing the project
according to their interests or needs, making sometimes those less active to become anxious or
unwilling to continue working. There are also the different goals students have, while some are
interested in the learning process other are only interested in getting the work done. The students to
work with this project have certain characteristics:
 There are students who tend to work and take all responsibility for the tasks or project.
 Some students lack the knowledge of making good research on the internet
 Students’ lack the culture of reading, making it difficult for them to bring information that
they can rely on.
 Some students lack the use of technology when making brochures, some rather do it
manually and printing out the information or images
 Students’ knowledge of the language is basic compared to what is needed for the making of
the project, and they may lack a lot of vocabulary, or the grammar structure required for the
task maybe not enough
  The excessive and incorrect use of translator can be an obstacle to the goal of language
learning.

Difficulties related to curriculum can be an obstacle, as mentioned before it could be because of the
goal of the curriculum, as it is not designed to be a project-based learning, most of the curriculums
in Mexico are based on, or care more about the final product than the process of doing a project,
giving students the expectation that the only important aspect is to get things done correctly than the
process to get there.

Personal Conclusions
To work with a project-based learning project can be challenging when never been into practice and
because of the characteristics it involves, like cooperative learning, student-centered, meaningful
learning, motivation, students’ autonomy, and creativity.

To carry out a project-based learning project requires a guide of several steps to follow in order to
get to the completion of the task. Within these steps, the teacher may encounter several difficulties
depending on the size of the group, the students’ roles and attitudes taken throughout the process.
Also, teacher can become aware of the difficulties that students have, such as the lack of skills, the
lack of the language level, the lack of technological knowledge.

Teachers may struggle with the implementation of project-based learning as sometimes the
curriculum is not directed or guided to be implemented with the project-based learning, along with
the school’s restrictions or the limited time to get a project done.

As many other methods of language learning, it is a matter of time and opportunity to give to these
methods, trying to work with them when given the chance and see if it adjusts to our needs and our
students.

References

Universidad IEXPRO. (n.d.). Tasks and Projects.

Johnston, T. C. (2005). Roles and responsibilities in team projects. Journal of College Teaching &
Learning (TLC), 2(12). [Link]

Pham, Thuan. (2018). Project-based learning: from theory to EFL classroom practice.
[Link]
BASED_LEARNING_FROM_THEORY_TO_EFL_CLASSROOM_PRACTICE

University of Oregon. (2010, April 21). Project Based Learning: Laura's Phrasal Verbs [Video].
YouTube. [Link]