FINAL PROJECT PROCESS

Presented by: ABEL ANDRS PERIN MORALES OMAR CRUZ CULLAR

UNIVERSIDAD DE LA AMAZONIA EDUCATION FACULTY ENGLISH DEGREE PROGRAM FLORENCIA-CAQUET 2012

CREATING AWARENESS ABOUT ADICTIONS STUDENTS MAY HAVE AT SCHOOL ( PROJECT BASED INSTRUCTIONTRUCTION) Vicious and addictions are everywhere and they can affect students daily lives at home and at school. People used to think that just drug or alcohol addictions are the most difficult problems a student may bound to face; so parents forbid their children these things but in some cases even when parents prevent their children, they tend to experiment drugs and vicious. Drug addiction at the high school level involves a surprising variety of substances, from marijuana and cocaine to many of the club drugs like ecstasy. When we send students to school to learn it is not expected that what they learn is how to develop a drug addiction. As the times goes by and the new technologies arise, there are more vicious and addiction not related to drug but that cause dependence. Here it is where we find the useful internet and the cellphones which are called nowadays

smartphones. And the gifts parents give students as a reward for good work and performance during the whole school year (the videogames). When students get addicted they simply forget everything, they forget who they are, what they really want, they change their daily activities for being just within the addiction or vicious they are involved in. That is why parents and teachers play a very important role in students lives at high school. They have to be a support; they have to explain the disadvantages drugs and addictions have in peoples lives. So students have the ability to decide what is good for them or not. LITERATURA REVIEW Learning a foreign language in a successful way has become a challenge for teachers around the world, and new strategies and approaches have arisen trying to make the learning process more meaningful. In some cases with the traditional approaches the students simple get bored of English; so they got demotivated of it. That was why we chose to work applying project based instruction based on task based activities in order to improve students motivation, participation during the classes and to make the learning process more meaningful for them. So, this project is focused on working creating awareness of everyday problems that are bound to happen in the students lives so they can have the enough knowledge to avoid and reject them because they are not good for

them as future professionals. I have sought the following information to support this project based instruction and show that it is worth being done. Involving students to work in a project sometimes is not an easy task. They are used to working doing drills of just simple things which do not require too much effort. So we as teachers have to motivate and convince students that working on a project is worthy.

The Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics defines

motivation as follows:

Motivation is generally considered to be one of the primary causes of success and failure in second language learning (2002: 344). On very important author we took into account is Stephen krashen (University of

Southern California.) He is an expert in the field of linguistics, specializing in theories of language acquisition and developed the Affective Filter hypothesis, embodies Krashen's view that a number of 'affective variables' play a facilitative, but non-causal, role in second language acquisition. These variables include: motivation, self-confidence and anxiety. Krashen claims that learners with high motivation, self-confidence, a good self-image, and a low level of anxiety are better equipped for success in second language acquisition. Low motivation, low self-esteem, and debilitating anxiety can combine to 'raise' the affective filter and form a 'mental block' that prevents comprehensible input from being used for acquisition. In other words, when the filter is 'up' it impedes language acquisition. On the other hand, positive affect is necessary, but not sufficient on its own, for acquisition to take place. So we gave the students the enough arguments of why the project was important, we told the disadvantages of them, so they can choose by themselves to work and participate on it just because they want to. Thats why one of our strategies was to lower the students affective filter by being funny, understandable, reasonable and also trying to speak in a normal way without pretending to be the polite or sophisticated teacher bragging of my role. In every class. Sometimes I had to raise the filter because the students were just messing around and they were not

working in the activities that I brought for them, in order to put into order the class. Motivating them in the project based learning process was very important because PBI is a very dynamic approach in which students explore real world issues and challenges and at the same time developing cross-curriculum skills while working in small collaborative groups. That was why interaction or social interaction played a very relevant role in our classes.

According to Vygotsky (1978), much important learning by the child occurs through

social interaction with a skillful tutor. The tutor may model behaviours and/or provide verbal instructions for the child. Vygotsky refers to this as co-operative or collaborative dialogue. The child seeks to understand the actions or instructions provided by the tutor (often the parent or teacher) then internalizes the information, using it to guide or regulate their own performance. Vygotsky also views interaction with peers as an effective way of developing skills

and strategies. He suggests that teachers use cooperative learning exercises where less competent children develop with help from more skillful peers - within the zone of proximal development.

A contemporary application of Vygotsky's theories is "reciprocal teaching", used to improve students' ability to learn from text. In this method, teacher and students collaborate in learning and practicing four key skills: summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting. The teacher's role in the process is reduced over time. Also, Vygotsky is relevant to instructional concepts such as "scaffolding" and "apprenticeship", in which a teacher or more advanced peer helps to structure or arrange a task so that a novice can work on it successfully. Vygotsky's theories also feed into current interest in collaborative learning, suggesting that group members should have different levels of ability so more advanced peers can help less advanced members operate within their zone of proximal development.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION This project is basically carried out because there at jean piajet high school there are mainly many students who own blackberries and they get distracted during the classes. This has been a very deep problem for teachers when conducting their classes. So we decided to create awareness about the issues involved in using these tools during the classes .And taking advantage of this we could introduce some other vicious and addictions students may face at school such as Facebook, alcohol, videogames and drugs addiction. We divided the students into five groups according to the topics. We developed different tasks so they could make use of the different skills. MAIN OBJECTIVES - To create in the students the awareness of not using cellphone during the classes. - to know the problems drugs and addictions cause in students lives inside and outside the school. - to use the language communicatively talking about a problem that is found in the society.

RESEARCH PROCESS AND THE WAY OF GATHERING DATA.

Teaching English nowadays is a full challenge for Teachers due to many factors that influence this process such as social and economical condition of the learners. A teacher must be eye opened all the time in order to scan students behaviors and attitudes toward learning process because some of them probable are facing serious problems in the family or in the streets and that may affect their attention in class. In order to prevent some of the problems students are facing, we decided to carry out a strategy using English language in order to prevent students to fall into these problems. One of the most common social problems is the addictions. When we speak about addictions we are not just making reference to the common ones such as marijuana, alcohol and some other similar; nowadays have emerged new

types of addictions, addictions related to the implement of new technologies like addiction to internet, facebook, blackberries and videogames. People may think these kind of addictions are not as nocive as the common ones, but if these addictions are not taken seriously, can perturb the mind of the addicted even in a worse scale than a smoker or alcohol drinker addicted. The addiction to the new technologies devices is increasing in an unimaginable speed and it is very hard that rehabilitation has effect, for instance, we as researchers think that preventing this addiction is better than curing it and because of that we started with this social project with the students from A1 level at Jean Piaget High School. In order to have coherence during the activities we designed lesson plans for each class. We developed the classes according to the lesson plans and wrote a small diary according to the experience of each one of the classes. In order to have a third person point of view of our activities we recorded some of the classes and it was very helpful in order to analyze in a more detailed way the students attitudes and the class performance and the effectiveness of the strategies used, besides we could see some other details like students pronunciation. According to the analysis we created strategies to improve our mistakes during the class. This research process took 10 hours.

CONCLUSIONS

1. As a result of the entire project we realized that learners are highly motivated by teachers attitude. Students worked in a good way and they had a nice response to the activities planned in task and project based without being pushed or forced by the teacher. Results of the analysis show that learner learn best when they work in groups in which there is a monitor who helps the entire group. For instance, they help each other to improve their weaknesses, this helps to enhance the whole group motivation and to improve their performance in every single skill, the results are going to be better than working individually in the activities.

2. Working with task and project based learning makes the learning process more meaningful and contextualize real life situations so, the students get more involved in the activities because it fits in a good way to their needs and for instance, the teacher talking time would be decreased in a high percentage. This fact improves the learners communicative skills.

3. If the project based is done in order to solve a problem which is presented in the students context; the learning process will be more meaningful and students will try to use the language communicatively focusing on meaning but not in form. So they will not be concerned about mistakes and improving their performance. At this point the teachers role is very needed in order to correct students slips

REFERENCES

- The Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics. - Stephen krashen (University of Southern California.) specialized in theories of language acquisition and development of the Affective Filter hypothesis. -Lev Semynov Vigotsky, cooperative learning theory (1978).