Abstract:

Project-based activity has become an integral part of learning process all over the world. Projects have been recently introduced into Russian schools as an invariant component of the learning process. Nevertheless, every year most first-year students of the foreign languages department of the pedagogical university demonstrate distinctive lack of skills essential for project-based learning.

On the other hand, the Federal state standards for both school and university education demand that students should possess the skills of searching and making a critical analysis and synthesis of information, collaborative work, the skills of implementing technological approach as essential part of their professional competence.

Thus, the purpose of our research was to introduce possible ways of implementing project-based activity into the professional training of would-be teachers of foreign languages. This also involves the ways of dealing with challenges that can arise. We define project-based language learning as a long-term activity that includes a variety of individual or cooperative tasks involving planning, researching, and reporting and presume that it is characterized by use of authentic language, emphasis on communicative competence, promotion of language learner autonomy, development of non-linguistic skills in research and collaborative work, student-centered learning. The research was conducted within the frames of the course “Methods of teaching English”.

The preparatory part of the research aimed at revising the learning material of the course and remodeling it in accordance with the goal of the study. Besides, it included choosing types of projects as well as methods and techniques to be used in the project-based learning. The formative part comprised organizing the course study in the form of project-based cooperative learning.

We used the classical logical scheme of any project activity which consists of the following stages:
1) problem stating,
2) goal setting
3) choosing methods and means of solving a problem,
4) research itself
5) getting data and their analysis
6) presentation of results
7) discussion and correction of results,
8) presenting a tangible end-product and its evaluation.

The obvious drawback of following that scheme was the time-consuming nature of incorporating it into a busy schedule of university learning. That problem was solved by dividing it into three parts: lectures, practical sessions and home assignments.

The resultative part involved control, assessment and reflection.The research results showed positive dynamics in the development of both communicative and information processing skills. Reflection survey also showed increased motivation to learning the language and interest in future profession.

Keywords:

Project-based activity, student-centered learning, professional competence of would-be teachers, teaching foreign languages.