Literature Review
Background
English, as a global language, has continuously fortified its pre-eminent role in the Vietnam education system since the 1986s. Nowadays, it is not only one of the main foreign languages in Vietnam, but also a compulsory subject in the official education program. Then, the need for study abroad, jobs, or even travel has fostered the use of communicative skills in real-life contexts. Therefore, the awareness of intensifying the use of communicative skills in teaching and learning English has been raised highly. However, it is still a challenge for both Vietnamese teachers and students to take the best advantages of the language skills and meet the goal.
As communicative skills are considered to be one of the most…show more content… Among the lack of confidence, lack of practical course books, the multi-level learners or the large class size, one of the most serious reasons for that is the lack of student engagement. This problem is considered to be dire as cited in Prensky (2001); Claxton (2007) and Taylor (2011). Gayle (2015) indicated that many students did not experience enjoyment even concentrating in class. Topics, together with class activities, are what they felt more negatively about (Gayle, 2015, p. 37). Willms, Friesen, and Milton (2009) noted that the problem of student disengagement at middle school and high school is typically higher than the others. This perspective is accurately telling the actual problem at my own workplace where middle school students are no more interested in task-based speaking activities. The students normally perform the required speaking tasks perfunctorily as a result of disengagement. Their oral skills, especially presentation skills, are consequently level off. Hence, the need for changing traditional teaching methods to engage students and improve their speaking skills is extremely essential at this point of time. That concern is also the main reason for conducting this research…show more content… This method could be clarified as “an instructional strategy that, via participating in a project, appeals to students due to learning by way of problem solving, data collection, and discussion, as well as the presentation of the results as reports” (Polman, 2000; Howard, 2002). By means of greatly encouraging the self-learning of students and promote better education achievements, it is highly recommended by many researchers that project-based teaching is worth considering (Chang & Lee, 2010; Gerber, Cavallo, & Marek, 2001, Shih, Chuang and Hwang, 2010). This method could even “situate learners with higher order cognitive processes in the modified version of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives, such as “analyze”, “evaluate” and “create” (Anderson, Krathwohl, Airasian, Cruickshank, Mayer, Pintrich, et al., 2001; Bloom et al., 1956). In addition, “Project-based learning enhances the collaboration and the cooperation between group members, reinforcing learning cognition, and promoting learning achievement” (Johnson, Johnson, & Holubec, 1994).Therefore, theoretical boring speaking tasks are now remarkably replaced by the new project-based teaching approach with numerous