Student’s Engagement and Writing Production in Project-Based Language Learning: The Potential of Using Learner-Generated Content

The introduction of the task-based language teaching approach has stressed the importance developing language skills through tasks that reflect or are directly anchored in real life (Nunan 2004). In this context, the choice of the topics and the contents for the task are essential to promoting meaningful language use and to facilitating learners’ engagement in discourse communities. However, tasks based on teacher-generated content might not always include learners’ intrinsic interests and real-life experiences, which in turn can lead to decreased motivation and disengagement during task performance (Lambert et al. 2017). Against this backdrop, we designed a school project that aimed at better integrating learner-generated and personalized content into the task and thus increasing students’ behavioral (e.g. spent time, text length), emotional (e.g. enjoyment, interest), and cognitive (e.g. text elaborateness) engage­ment (Philp & Duchesne 2016, Phung 2017). The project was carried out with a group of N=23 students in their 6th year of L3 German at a Swedish upper secondary school.The students produced informative texts on their favorite feel-good places, enriched them with their own pictures and published their productions in the form of an integrated digital city tour using the tool Thinglink®. We documented the project implement­ation through video-recorded sessions, students’ productions, a questionnaire on students’ perceptions, and a teacher interview. In this paper, we will discuss the benefits of integrating learner-generated content in terms of students’ engagement and writing performance as well as the implications for the teaching practice. Keywords Engagement, L2 writing, Project-based language learning References [1] Nunan, D. (2004). Task-based language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [2] Lambert, C., Philp, J., Nakamura, S. (2017). Learner-generated content and engagement in second language task performance. Language Teaching Research 21(6), 665-680. [3] Philp, J., Duchesne, S. (2016). Exploring engagement in tasks in the language classroom. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 36, 50–72. [4] Phung, L. (2017). Task preference, affective response, and engagement in L2 use in a US university context. Language Teaching Research 21(6), 751-766