Project Based Learning: Nurturing Creativity into Technology-Enhanced Students’ Project Works

Project Based Learning (PBL) which ‘inherently’ gives rise to 21st century skills development for learners is gaining round across various English language pedagogical contexts. Today’s students are ‘digital natives’ and with technology at hand, PBL has been instrumental in incorporating websites, apps, mobile devices, and other electronic devices to bring about successful learning outcomes. Students in PBL conditions make collaboration; create opportunities for critical thinking, linguistic and intercultural awareness. In the technology-mediated Project-based Language Teaching (PBLT) approach, students can have chance to create their own projects with right guidance from the teacher. Despite positive learning outcomes, diverse factors such as teachers’ readiness, teaching contexts, technology affordance, and exam oriented curriculum hinder proper integration of technology into designing projects. From a practical and conceptual standpoint, this paper first argues for a PBLT approach that caters for both teachers’ and students’ freedom, choice and engagement to achieve empowerment, addressing diversity of students’ learning styles and habits to have awareness of real life applications of creative projects. This paper also specifically advocates for teachers’ awareness and preparedness in tapping into students’ digital affinity to be inventive in setting up project works. For example, Students creating online crossword games for vocabulary learning. Overall, this article offers a discussion on the technology affordances in PBL, opportunities and challenges to integrate students’ resourcefulness in the use of digital devices in their project works. This paper finally puts forward a list of technology-enhanced PBL project designs for teachers to think about the applicability in teaching contexts.