Egamberdiyev elbek alisher ugli course paper

2.2 The challenges of using project based learning in teaching speaking skills
Practicing PBL at school aligns what students are learning with the needs of the modern workplace, making it a desirable objective for schools to pursue. Yet, a large number of failed attempts lead a growing number of teachers to give up on the practice altogether. The two most significant challenges are teamwork, an important skill that holds the potential for conflict and free-riding by students, and the difficulty experienced by teachers and students in adapting to non-traditional teaching and learning roles. Other important challenges include demanding workloads for teachers and students, a superficial gain of content knowledge, lack of clear implementation guidelines, lack of focus on identified learning outcomes, a lack of trained personnel that can lead PBL, and lack of adequate professional development to train PBL.
The Teamwork Challenge
Both teachers and students consider teamwork to be challenging. Although they recognized its great benefits with students’ future careers, they experienced a great deal of frustration in facilitating it. Students' attitude towards teamwork is ambiguous. Some flat out hate it, but when assigned to a group with motivated students, they seem to like the experience.
Students point to free riding, unequal division of labor, large groups, poor attendance, or dropping out altogether, as the main issues they have to tackle with. In an article titled: “What teens resent: Classrooms controlled by students rather than teachers,” Maureen Downey reports that most students hate teamwork because they say that “the smartest kids do all the work²⁹”. As it turns out, students resent a lack of a framework for ensuring equal contribution from students and would greatly benefit from training about collaborative work. The two most significant challenges are teamwork, an important skill that holds the potential for conflict and free-riding by students, and the difficulty experienced by teachers and students in adapting to non-traditional teaching and learning roles.
Speaking is perceived as the most fundamental skill to acquire since the onset of the communicative era is treated as the ultimate goal of language teaching, and its proper development has become the attention of both teachers and learners. However, it is also a commonly recognized fact that achieving proficiency in foreign language speaking is not an easy task. Thus, it is important for teachers to be aware of the challenges in teaching speaking so that they can seek for solutions to them.
Accordingly, this preliminary study collected data by interviewing two teachers from a public senior high school in Bireuen, Aceh. These teachers have been teaching English for the past ten years in the school, respectively. They revealed that the challenges they encountered most in teaching speaking are students’ lack of vocabulary, pronunciation problems, nothing to say, lack of motivation and the use or interferences of the mother tongue. Thus, the teachers do their best to overcome these challenges along the process of their teaching in the classroom, and some of their efforts are also discussed in the paper. Future studies are suggested to collect data from other sources such as observations in the classroom during the teaching and learning process and gather information from students themselves through interviews and questionnaires.³⁰