Hello dear colleagues! 

I am the Fourth guest teacher in the site as you have already read in the welcome greetings on the front page. If you would like to know a bit more about teaching in my country, Argentina, I invite you to read my interview with Teaching English. There I also explain about my interest in developing different innovative projects with my students along the academic year. I have found a very interesting link in the Teaching English Website that explains about advantages and disadvantages in organizing projects with adolescents and I would like to analyse my students’ projects in the light of the theory presented by this article. For a complete reference to it you can go to the following link:

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/articles/project-work-with-teenagers
by Lynn Gallacher, British Council, Spain (2004) 

In it the author analyses possible advantages and disadvantages of organising projects with adolescent students. In the case of the first project I organised with my students, it was related to work with values and in this special case the value of Care for ourselves and others. We read some material about UNICEF, worked with vocabulary and discussed about different organisations that did a similar work in Tucuman, our province and also in the whole country. Departing from this point, we discussed about different outcomes the project might have and agreed that the final product should be exposed during the Students’ Week in September. They were also going to participate in a national contest organised by Pearson Longman Argentina. Among the possibilities of displaying their work that we discussed about I can mention: displaying posters about charity campaigns, a raffle to obtain money to help poor children near school, a newspaper article or an interview about charity campaigns carried out by teachers or students at school, a website and a metro flog page in order to increase awareness about poverty and hunger in our country and the world. 

The advantages I found during the work in order of importance are the following:

• A context was established which provided us with an authentic to topic to talk about and as a starting point to organise our project. Haines (1989)
• Increased motivation was evident because learners became personally involved in the project.
• Authentic tasks were proposed and therefore the language input was more authentic.
• Cross-curricular connections because we checked concepts and information with teachers from other subjects like History, Religion and Computer Studies.
• A break from routine was very beneficial because it offered us the chance to do something different and we all enjoyed that.
• All four skills, reading, writing, listening and speaking were integrated and practised.
• Autonomous learning was promoted as learners became responsible for finding their resources, materials, information and became more responsible of their learning.
• There were learning outcomes that could be displayed at school and could be sent to participate in the national contest.
• Interpersonal relations were developed through working as a group. Among the disadvantages I could observe the following: 
• Learners used their own language which was inevitable as they all speak the same L1, but the importance of the topic dealt with and the tasks proposed outweigh this factor.
• Use of translators on line which many of the groups did in order to find help to write phrases in English. However the problems caused by this practice were solved with corrections I carried out personally with each group.
• Some learners doing nothing in spite of the fact that most of the students worked hard, there were some who did very little, because of internal problems in the groups, or simply lack of interest. This behaviour is expected from some more problematic students but a way to solve it is careful planning, division of roles and work and constant prising of the work accomplished so as to re-cycle motivation.
• Groups that worked at different paces were expected to appear in these numerous groups, therefore some final works were finished at different times, and that included working extra hours outside English classes.
  Adapted from Gallacher, L. (2004)

These might be only some of the advantages and disadvantages found when doing project work with our students. I would like other colleagues to comment about any other aspects they might have found in their own experiences! In subsequent entries I will be discussing the actual project entries produced by the students. I will also like to read any other comments you might like to do as regards the topic, as well as any questions you would like to ask.

Kind regards from Argentina
Paula Bello