Welcome to "The Way Ahead", and to an authentic and enjoyable means of studying English in a Project-based setting. We sincerely hope that you and your students will find the journey through the book stimulating, motivating, fulfilling and fruitful.

This book puts the learner and his/her needs at the center of the learning process. This means considering the feelings as well as the intellect of the learner, using his/her interests in the classroom, giving value to his/her opinions and wishes, promoting student-student interaction, and stressing self-awareness and self-realization. It also entails addressing motivation, since this drives language acquisition. Activities based on these ideas address the cognitive, affective, and interactive aspects of learning, and the role of the teacher becomes one of facilitator, sharing in the growing process.

A "Project" framework is an ideal way of incorporating these ideas into language learning, since it provides the infrastructure for learning, but allows students and teachers to decide the content and the method of learning. If students can also carry out the various decision-making sub-tasks in the target language, then they will gain even more valuable practice in using that language in an authentic manner.

Seeing a Project through from beginning to end helps students to believe in their oral abilities. They can see that their communicative skills can be used to perform "real" events in the target language, and they can have the concrete evidence of a video tape, a cassette tape, or a news-sheet (for example) as proof of this fact. The Project format also involves students in a number of processes which will benefit them in their learning in the future: i) diagnosing needs; ii) formulating objectives; iii) planning course content; iv) designing and implementing that content; and v) evaluating learning.

Language-learning should be exciting and enjoyable, as well as fulfilling, and the Project-framework provides the setting for this to happen. The target language can be employed at every stage, students can see their efforts come to fruition in a final performance-related outcome, and the means of preparing for that final result can be in itself enlightening and rewarding. 

A number of Projects are outlined in this book, proceeding from a structured approaches to more open-ended ones. Teachers and students should feel free to adapt as they feel fit, using whatever materials they see as appropriate and productive, and branching out when the opportunity arises. The main goal must be to motivate students to get involved in their learning, and to encourage them to do this by joining in wholeheartedly in the production of "English Events". Once students are motivated, everything else follows, including independent learning, self assessment, lowering of affective barriers, and awareness of learning strategies, all of which are sub-goals of this book and point out "The Way Ahead".



Andrew Finch and Hyun, Tae-duck

January 1999