Developing students' oral communication skills in the primary EFL classroom: a project-based proposal

Abstract

Over the last years, there has been a growing concern about the best approaches and methodologies to teach English for equipping students with the essential skills for effective communication, especially orally as well as with other key competences, such as lifelong learning. This dissertation shows the process carried out to plan and design a project for an English Foreign Language (EFL) Primary classroom whose main objective is to improve students’ oral communication skills. The project has been developed relying on the approaches that have proved to be most effective for the teaching and learning of EFL, namely, Project Based Learning, Communicative Language Teaching, Task-Based Learning, and Cooperative Learning. The evaluation of the proposal shows how the use of active, participative and communicative methodologies which consider the learners agents of their own learning and provide them with the necessary scaffolding to build their own meanings, positively affects the development of students’ oral communication skills. The work climate that is created through these methodologies also gives confidence to learners who feel more and more capable of expressing themselves in English. This project shows that these approaches are indeed to be followed in our 21st century Primary EFL classrooms

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