Abstract:

School project activity is an immanent feature of the modern teaching process in various disciplines, and foreign languages are no exception. Moreover, national state educational standards challenge the absolute realisation of a project-based approach within each stage of learning. However, while investing effort and time into reaching project goals and operating with digital technologies, teachers occasionally fail to meet equally significant targets, such as polishing basic grammar skills, engaging students, and accommodating their current interests.

The issue describes a learning modularized experiment conducted in primary and secondary sectors of a Russian secondary school (students in Grade 4-9). The procedure aims at investigating how a tutor of English could arrange a studying process to implement all the recommendations simultaneously. The research does not merely initiate an interaction of mixed-grade students’ groups but also focuses on principal measurable and unmeasurable educational objectives comprising motivation, attainment level, project activity organisation, gameplaying, and studying independence. These goals define the work as relevant and worth acknowledging.

The experiment comprises four milestones: analytical, creative, performing, and re-evaluating. Firstly, students of the higher grades conduct an online English practice test for the primary school learners measuring their academic progress. Further on, the “newly-qualified teachers” are responsible for processing the generated results. While assessing the skill level by established criteria, the young researchers ought to elicit common mistakes and designate them according to the corresponding linguistic fields – spelling, orthoepic, grammar items.

In the creative phase, young scholars invent linguistic fairy-tales contriving a captivating plot and, with the help of it explaining to the little students potentially confusable cases – one storytelling project for a single frequently met mistake.

Finally, the students are in charge of performing fairy tales to the target audience and should evaluate the investigation outcome.

The foundation of the research concludes the elements of linguistic frequency analysis and the core playing mechanics of the board game ‘Once Upon a Time’ by Atlas Games. This approach provides interworking of scientific and entertaining aspects. Apart from that, the project realisation is characterized by ultimate students’ independence in trends of a teacherless process.

The school cross-staging experiment involved 72 participants and delivered the following significant results:
- Successful conjunction of scientific research and creative activity;
- a positive experience of cross-staging interaction;
- improving general language skills of the younger students;
- increasing learning inducement of the students in all the grades;
- practicing elements of the teacherless studying process.

The article demonstrates the project pattern for foreign languages, but the scheme could be held for various spheres regarding primary school students.

Keywords:

Linguistic fairy-tales, storytelling projects, school project activity, foreign languages.