Week 8 Discussions

We had lots of discussions this week. Firstly, we discussed about articles about TEPBLL. I was assigned to read the article Promoting competency-based language teaching through project-based language learning written by Dooly in 2013. This article really gave me a lot more insights into TEPBLL and other theories. It let me see the differences between PBLL and PBL as well as PBLL and TBLT. It was quite interesting to see that language learning theories were evolving. From Project based learning, task-based language teaching to project based language learning, the theories have grown so much. Undoubtedly, PBLL theories share a lot of common features with the other two theories, but its focus on authentic purpose really help learners gain more in learning. The scaffolding that is integrated in PBLL gives learners more opportunities to explore by themselves. This will enhance learners' ability to solve problems and also their competence in many different areas.

Another thing that I liked about this article is the author brought up the topic about low-level language learners in a collaboration project. Whether low-level language learners need more training and scaffolding before the project really interested me. I believed they did need more scaffolding than higher level learners since their language proficiency may caused issues in a project. This article did not specifically pinpoint this topic, but offered some suggestions to get low-level learners engaged in a project. The authors' suggestions were focused on enhancing those learners' confidence in speaking since a collaborative project requires interaction. The author suggested that teachers should slowly build on the scaffolding to help learners overcome their fear of communication.

Aside from the discussion about TEPBLL, we also investigated some word cloud applications: Tagul, Wordle and Tagxedo. These applications can be used for language teaching. They can be applied to a warm-up discussion where students need to find out what they will be learning based on the words presented. Other than that, those applications can be used for teaching high frequency words used in academic papers.