New Approaches: PBL, TBL and CRLL
What are these new approaches?
Education is changing, and it is aiming towards new approaches which are centered on the student's own learning and development. These educational techniques are known as Project-Based Learning (PBL), Task-Based Learning (TBL) and Content-Rich Language Learning (CRLL).
Task-Based Learning: Improving the language through real-life situations
Let's get this straight: learning grammar and vocabulary without even knowing why you need it for is, most of the times, pointless. Here's when TBL comes into play. Let's think of a task that might be of interest for the students, such as creating the school's online newspaper. Here, the main aim won't be the language itself (we won't be focusing on whether the student uses the past simple or the future continuous), as we'll only use it as a tool to fulfill the final aim: the newspaper.
Imagine we are in a class of thirty students. The class could be divided in groups of five students, who will focus on a section of the newspaper (such as sports, news from the school, news from the outside, the weather, games and the horoscope). It is important that every student has a role in their group, so that they all know what they should do for
their teams. For example, in the sports section, there could be three journalists, who would find the information they need (maybe one could watch the football match during the recess, the second one could watch the basketball match and the third one could gather information about what's done in P. E.); a writer, who would write in the newspaper about what the journalists have gathered; and an editor, who would edit the newspaper's webpage and correct the writer's possible mistakes.
Project-Based Learning: Learning through performing
Did TBL sound appetizing? Wait 'till you hear about PBL! What if I told you that in a PBL classroom you wouldn't be attending boring one-hour-long lectures where you sit and listen to the teacher's explanation? I bet you'd say: "I'm down for it!" In PBL, you are the protagonist and you learn through working on the project, and what's more: you'd get to learn content from different subjects at the same time!
Let's start with a driving question that your teacher (or teachers) poses: "What makes a food typical of a country?" If you google this question, you won't find a clear, true answer, but only different hypothesis that would help you reach an answer. For this project, we would need to do different tasks that would help us reach a final hypothesis for the posed question. Throughout all the process, we would need to find information about the culture, the landscape and the resources that you can find in a country.
But why don't we add more stuff to this project though? Why don't we make groups of five again and we assign every group a country which they will have to investigate? And finally, why don't we make them participate in a food fair in which they have to cook a dish from their country, build a stand and film themselves explaining the recipe? All of this is possible thanks to PBL, but for all these tasks we would need a lot of time! PBL projects take sometimes months to be completed, as it is a lot of work that needs to be perfectly done to get a good, enriching final product.
Content-Rich Language Learning: All you need to know to learn a language
Remember all the exciting, enthralling English classes where you were speaking about the present perfect continuous and the future simple? Me neither!
Let's try something different. Let's talk about the Vikings (Vikings are cool!). We could create a whole new teaching unit based on the Vikings and their way of life. It would be a perfect teaching unit to include the past tense and make students use it while they are learning new vocabulary and acquiring more knowledge!
We could also talk about a futuristic movie such as I, Robot or Gattaca, where students would learn how to make hypothesis of what could happen in the future and justify it while learning new vocabulary related to technology.
Lots of topics fit in CRLL English classes as long as you, as a teacher, can make the topic relevant and interesting for your students. You could even end up creating a hip-hop song all together! Dare to try it!
If you want to know more about CRLL, we recommend you read this article:
Escobar Urmeneta, C. (2012). "Content-Rich Language Learning in Context-Rich Classrooms". APAC, 74, 39-47.