International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences

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Project-Based Learning to Improve Students’ English Skills: Issues and Challenges

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Project-based learning (PjBL) has emerged as a powerful pedagogical approach to enhancing students' English and soft skills, especially in promoting active language use in authentic contexts. PjBL has been implemented in various levels of education all over the world. The importance of this topic is to explore the potential of PjBL approach to enhance English skills while addressing the practical challenges faced in educational contexts. This paper employs a literature review methodology to examine existing studies on the implementation of PjBL in English language learning and the challenges faced during its implementation. The findings reveal that PjBL has the full potential in enhancing students’ English skills. PjBL is also shown to improve students’ soft skills, namely critical thinking, problem-solving, and communication skills. However, the study identifies common issues and challenges such as insufficient teacher training, lack of alignment between project goals and language learning objectives, constraints of time, classroom management, resources availability, and social context. To overcome these challenges, the study suggests institutions and universities to provide all lecturers with upgrading or seminar regarding to the use PjBL in teaching and learning to improve lecturers’ professional development. Universities need to develop new model of PjBL and lecturers need to implement several models of PjBL that enhance students’ English skills and soft skills. Further research is proposed to explore the long-term effects of PjBL on students’ language acquisition across different educational contexts, as well as to investigate scalable PjBL models that can be adapted to various classroom environments.
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