USING PBL TO ENHANCE EFL
SKILLS: A POSSIBILITY?
Anchalee Chayanuvat
Walailak University
Nakhon Si Thammarat
canchale@wu.ac.th
Reflections on Teaching
• What are your worries
when you teach?
• What are the usual
roles you take as a
teacher?
What are your students’
expectations?
What do we want our students to
learn?
• Learn how to learn (know how they can learn
best)
• Develop a life-long learning approach.
• Learn actively.
• Practice the following skills:
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Communication Skills
Problem analysing skills
Literature review
Hypothesizing
Synthesizing
Conceptualizing
What is PBL?
• Ideally, PBL can enhance:
– Researching skills
– Confidence to deal with new happenings
• PBL is a method of education in which the
student is at the centre. In PBL, students
themselves are to a large degree responsible for
their own learning process. Students decide for
themselves what they want to learn and have
considerable control over the choice of literature.
PBL’s Rationale
(based on PBL: Step by Step by Gino Camp, Angelique
van het KAAR, Henk van de Mollen and Henk Schmidt,
document of ERASMAS University)
• Learning by discussing problems has been
proven to make the study material more
interesting and challenging.
• Learning in context leads to a better transfer
of the knowledge obtained.
• Research has shown that new knowledge is
retained better when you make an effort to
determine what you already know about the
subject before you start learning. Activation
of prior knowledge prepares your brain for
the storage of new information.
PBL’s Rationale
• Research has also indicated that knowledge
becomes more useful, easier to retrieve from
memory and that it can be retained for longer
periods of time if it is elaborated on. Elaboration
of knowledge is an important activity.
• Studying is more structured when you know
what you want to know. Formulating learning
issues is important.
• In PBL, students select their own sources of
information—being responsible of their own
learning.
Quality Learning
• When someone learns out of his or her
own willingness, learning has a better
quality and is more sustainable.
• When learning is thoroughly enjoyed, it Is
not a burden as often felt by many
students.
• Dickinson (1987:9) believes that learning
is a personal individual act.
Quality Learning
• Senge (1990:14) says one learns to be human.
• Kolb (1984 in Kahonen, 1992, 16-17) says
quality learning is experiential learning.
• Kahonen (1990:283) believes in reflection—
experience at deeper levels understanding and
interpretation.
• Mezirow et al (2000:3) states that learning is an
interpretation of one’s experience using prior
interpretation to guide future action.
Quality Learning
• Learning is a process through which one
changes, both behaviourally and mentally.
The cause of this change is experience.
This experience is in turn influenced by
power of reflection.
• These three words—experience,
interpretation and reflection indicate that
successful learners reflect all the time.
Quality Learning
• As we all know, learning never occurs as a result
of teaching (Ormrod, 1995:250). Thus, it is
important to give students some freedom to
explore on their own.
• Literature in the field confirms the value of selfdirectedness.
• Bailey (1983) mentions serious competition
among learners but cooperative learning may
help solve the problem (Crandall, 1999).
Assumptions about Learning
• Learning is the interaction of a variety of
factors: the learner, the teacher, the
curriculum, peers and the experiences that
learners have gone through.
• Learners themselves play a key role in the
process of learning. To be successful, they
should be autonomous and be in control of
their learning processes.
What are students expected to
achieve in a PBL curriculum?
• Graduates in PBL are said to be better
than colleagues educated in traditional
curricula to :
• Solve problems in their area of expertise.
• Cooperate with others
• Chair a meeting
• Work independently and plan their work.
• Find information independently and make
use of different sources.
What are teachers expected to do
in a PBL Curriculum?
• Facilitates
• Caring for students
• Encouraging students to learn on their
own
Class Types in PBL
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1. Lectures
2. Small group tutorials
3. Lab sessions/ skills labs
4. Study Trips
5. Role plays
6. Panel discussions by experts
7. Support for individuals
The Seven Jumps (Steps)
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1. Clarify unfamiliar terms
2. Problem Definition
3. Brainstorming
4. Problem Analysis
5. Formulate Learning Issues
6. Self-study
7. Reporting
Explanations
• Clarify terms—dealing with difficult vocabulary
• Discuss the problem and decide what
phenomena need to be explained
• Seek explanations, formulate possible
explanations and explore the groups’ existing
knowledge
• Summarize and identify what knowledge is
lacking for the phenomenon to be explained
• Formulate learning goals
• Self-study
• Bring back the knowledge to the group. Explain
by going back to the problem. Evaluate.
The significance of a problem in
PBL
• A problem is a description of a realistic
situation that contains one or more
phenomena in need of explanation.
Nu Picha Suffering at WU
• Nu Picha came from a village school in a remote area.
She could not read nor write nor understand spoken
English. When she came to Walailak University for the
first time, she tried to escape using English in the
classroom and got away each time. She did not attend
many classes and she didn’t care. Nu Picha has a
boyfriend from high school, also studying at Walailak
University. Now they moved to Kum Sawad to live
together. She never did assignments. No one could help
her pass the exams although she got some class marks
for group assignments that she didn’t do, she got an F in
English in the first term and felt upset about it. That
made her want to give up on English forever. It will not
make her or her family any better. On the other hand,
she doesn’t want to be retired as she is the hope of her
parents.
Can PBL be used to teach English?
• What do you think?
Let’s get into a demonstration.
Time for questions.
THANK YOU
References
The list of references is in your handout.