CHALLENGES ENCOUNTEREDBY SECOND-YEAR STUDENTS IN THE DOCUMENTARY PROJECT AT UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

Abstract

Challenges that students encountered in project-based learning has been mentioned by a number of researchers in their implementation studies (Krajcik et al., 1998; Stauffacher et al., 2006; Harmer and Stokes, 2014). Nevertheless, there is limited empirical research directly addressing this matter in English language teaching (Harmer and Stokes, 2014). The shortage of evidence on the challenges that students encounter in project-based learning leaves a gap that needs to be filled.Focusing on the context of the Faculty of English Language Teacher Education, University of Languages and International Studies (FELTE, ULIS),this paper attempts to investigate the challenges that students faced, their responses to the challenges and some suggestions they made for further improvement in a project called the Documentary project. For the accomplishment of these purposes, a survey was conducted on 67 second-year students in the Honors Program, among whom 8 students were selected forsemi-structured interviews. The results have shown that students faced a number of challenges while conducting the Documentary project, regarding projectobjectives; project tasks; teacher’s instructions ; group members’ knowledge/ability; group work during implementation; assessment and feedback of project outcome. The challenges concerning teacher’s instruction, group work and assessment were the most prominent.With each type of challenges, students had different responses.Students suggested that teachers should support them by providing more frequent and detailed instructions, specifying the criteria in the marking rubrics and giving more valuable feedback