Chapter Six: Addressing Our Students' Needs: Combined Task-Based and Project-Based Methodology in Second Language and CLIL Courses

1 The need for a new approach to learningThe world is changing at a faster pace than ever before and we need to prepare our students for a highly interconnected global world and for life in a multicultural society. Information is available constantly and immediately just by tapping a few keys on a computer. Consequently, new times should bring new approaches to teaching. Nowadays, while our students are still required to learn certain contents, it is also crucial that they acquire skills that will be useful for their entire lives, which they can apply in a variety of contexts, and which they can use to solve all kind of problems. Learning specific information may not be as crucial as knowing how to use available information to solve new problems.Long ago, Swain (1985) noticed that even students in complete immersion programs rarely acquired bilingual proficiency in the second language. She questioned the validity of the Natural Approach to Second Language Teaching (an approach that sustains that a learner will gain proficiency in a language as long as s/he is presented with sufficient Comprehensible Input) and came to the conclusion that in order to gain such knowledge of the language, students should have ample opportunity to create Comprehensible Output, that is, to produce the target language in a meaningful and purposeful manner, making hypotheses about the new linguistic system and reflecting on it (a meta-linguistic component). However, learning a second language is a process that is much more complex than this.Previously (Perez-Ibanez 2012), I have sustained that Content and Language Integrated Learning can help our students attain better proficiency in their second language while at the same time acquiring substantial content knowledge. In those pages I presented evidence in support of the effectiveness of a Task Based Learning (TBL) approach for reaching those objectives. Through this methodology, students can acquire the linguistic structures in the Second Language classroom that they will need in their content classes. In an ideal world, students in the Second Language classroom will be presented with the structures and vocabulary that they will require in order to complete different tasks in their content classroom. Such activities should be designed in such a way that students can extend the practice of the recently learnt lexemes and syntactic structures. If properly followed, this approach presupposes that the content teacher has a high command of the second language (which in many countries is not the case - see Di Martino and Di Sabato 2012 for the case of Italy, for example) and requires strong institutional interdisciplinary commitment and constant coordination between different academic departments.In this article I would like to add one more component to that equation: the Project Based Learning (PBL) methodology. While a TBL approach can help students acquire the linguistic and content requirements of a course, it can fall short in the area of helping students develop the life-long global and creative skills necessary to thrive in today's ever more interconnected world and, most especially, in the current global job market. Adding a Project Based Learning component at the end of each TBL instructional unit can help students to bridge this important gap and foster the development of these vital competencies.2 The Task Based Learning (TBL) approachTask Based Learning is a second language teaching methodology that emphasizes the importance of experience and functionality in the language acquisition process. This approach understands a task as an assignment focused on information manipulation and transmission. It is primarily a functional approach, as each task needs to be meaningful and based on a reallife situation, that is, a situation that a student could potentially face in everyday life (examples of tasks could be as varied as ordering food in a restaurant, visiting a doctor, or presenting a product to a group of prospective clients). …