Project-based Learning in College English Instruction

With the development of curriculum, project-based learning (PBL), which started from the medical field, began to be applied to more content-based courses and is attracting the concern of EFL practitioners and researchers. Former studies all demonstrate the value of PBL in the overall development of students, but little research is conducted in college English instruction in China. This paper presents a three-semester study which demonstrated the feasibility of PBL in college English instruction. The study also reveals the contradiction between PBL and the current course evaluation, especially the testing system in colleges and universities in China. PBL calls for an all-round innovation from course evaluation, learning assessment, teaching approaches to course-book compilation in order to satisfy the needs of society for English.