Abstract:

The transition to being an independent country after the collapse of the Soviet Union has brought many changes in all spheres of life in Kazakhstan including education. The current educational reform in higher education in Kazakhstan is aimed at providing the local markets with highly qualified specialists orientated for lifelong self-development, self -education and creative innovative activities. This requires transfer from teacher-centered teaching approach to student-centered one and orientation on active methods of knowledge acquisition in education.
One of the most effective ways of involving students in the learning process is content-based project delivery which promotes meaningful student engagement into language and content learning. By integrating project work into content- based instruction we create such a learning environment that spurs active student involvement, stimulates higher level thinking styles, develops self-study skills and makes students feel responsible for the outcome of their learning process.
This presentation aims at demonstrating how project work can be integrated into content-based instruction on the successful example of a business project “Starting up a company», integrated into the syllabus of ESP courses at Kazakh-British Technical University in Kazakhstan. Based on a number of features that make project work an appealing approach to language instruction a team of English language instructors at KBTU has introduced it as a self-study method of learning language.
The goal of this business project is to create a stimulating learning environment that motivates students to broaden their basic understanding of major business concepts and issues that are embedded into a content-based course through active involvement in learning process and self-study. An important objective is to enable students to apply in practice the Business English and professional knowledge and skills they acquire in classroom and build up entrepreneurial and business communication skills. To achieve these goals, they are supposed to create an imaginary mock up company which might be operating on the Kazakhstani market.
In such a content-based approach, the activities of the language class are specific to the subject matter being taught, and are geared to stimulate students to think and learn through the use of the target language and combine cognitive learning with problem solving and decision- making processes. What is really important is that students are involved in a simulation game and act as if they are entrepreneurs.
The presenter will provide a rationale for content-based instruction, demonstrate the content and main stages of the project including the final production and performance stages, propose evaluation instruments that allow to assess students’ progress at each stage respectively including continuous and summative assessment and present tentative steps for project coordination and practical guidelines for sequencing and developing a project.
We hope that language teachers and teacher educators will be able to adapt the ideas presented here to enhance their classroom instruction and see that such kind of project based learning can be fun, inspiring, challenging, pedagogically valuable, and more importantly, beneficial and rewarding for both teachers and students.

Keywords:

content-based instruction (cbi), project work, content-based project work, business project.