library project work

Resource materials for libraryproject work

Sarah North

In projects, the central importance of the theme or topic often means thatsuccess depends upon the provision of appropriate resource materials.This is particularly important when project work is used to develop infor-mation skills for study purposes. Ideally, students need access to a suitablelibrary, but in many situations th'is is not possible, and the teacher mustsupply the resource materials. This article outlines a system for providing a'mini-library' specifically designed to support project work.

Types of project Projects are notoriously difficult to define, but one essential characteristicis that they involve 'an integrated programme of work built around a cent-ral situation or idea' (UTMU, 1986). Content is therefore given priority,and the teaching of specific skills derives from the requirements of theproject itself. For example, a project in which students report on a localtourist attraction might involve writing a letter of enquiry to the localtourist board, designing a questionnaire, interviewing tourists, compilingstatistical results, and writing the report itself. If the project is to be suc-cessful, students must have something to say about the topic, and willtherefore require a resource base from which they can derive their owncontent. The resource base is therefore a crucial element in the success ofa project, the importance of which can easily be underestimated. Projectscan take various forms, but differences in the nature of the main resourcebase allow us to identify four main types. This classification is based onthe primary source of data, regardless of any other resources which mayalso be employed in the project.

1 Community projects, in which students derive their information largelyfrom the local community, using methods such as observation, question-naires, interviews and letter-writing. A good example is the projectdescribed by Fried-Booth (1982), in which students compiled a bookletfor disabled tourists in Bath. Lewis (1983) provides a workbook ofmaterials for projects of this type.

2 Case studies, in which students are provided with specific documents(real or imaginary) relating to a particular problem which has to besolved. At the University of Surrey, for example, a communication skillscourse for civil engineers included a project on skidding, based on genu-ine data about an accident black spot (Gee, Huxley, and Johnson, 1984).Since students often have to take on imaginary roles in this category ofproject, there is considerable overlap with extended simulations of thetype described by Jones (1982).

222 ELT Journal Volume 4413 July 1990 © Oxford University Press 1990

Resources fordeveloping

informationretrieval skills

Obstacles

3 Practical projects, in which students are required to carry out practicalwork to reach their objective, which may involve, for example, producinga design, building a model or real object, carrying out an experiment, orcreating a computer programme. The main resource base is therefore inthe form of equipment and material. There are several examples of thistype of project used with students of science and technology, such asbuilding a box kite (Herbolich, 1979), and designing and constructing asolar collector (Horey, 1983). However, it need not involve sophisticatedscientific knowledge or equipment, and the 'ideas for egg races' compiledby the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS)(1983) can be readily adapted for use as practical projects with all kinds ofstudents. In English-speaking countries, practical projects may also drawon the local community—as, for example, in the project described byCarter and Thomas (1986), in which EFL learners taught in local primaryschools.

4 Library projects, in which the main resource base is a library. Typically,students are expected to take a particular topic, read about it, and pro-duce some kind of written work.

The first three types of project may seem generally preferable for lan-guage learning, since they tend to involve a greater variety of skills, andhave more immediate appeal to students. The advantage of the libraryproject, however, is its importance as a way of providing training in infor-mation skills for study purposes.

Many students require English for study purposes at school, college, oruniversity, either because the institution uses English as a medium ofinstruction, or because a significant amount of reading material is avail-able only in English. They will therefore need (among other study skills)the ability to use a library effectively to retrieve information. There are anumber of books designed to teach EFL students these skills (forexample, Wallace, 1980; O'Brien and Jordan, 1985; Hamp-Lyons andCourter, 1984), but however good the practice materials, they remainclassroom exercises, with a number of inevitable limitations. Firstly, sincethe exercises are based on artificial situations, students may not perceivethem as relevant and useful in real life. Secondly, since each exercise isisolated, a mistake has few, if any, adverse consequences, and studentsmay therefore not realize the importance of these skills. Finally, theamount of practice is necessarily limited, and unless the newly acquiredskills are put to use, they may soon be lost. The library project, however,can provide a solution to these problems, allowing the development ofinformation skills, integrated with other study skills, in a coherent pro-gramme of work.

A library project, however, requires a library, and this may create animmediate obstacle, particularly in overseas situations. To practise infor-mation retrieval skills, there must be a variety of sources from which stu-dents can select relevant materials, and which cater for differences intheir interests, subject knowledge, and language ability. There is no real-istic way to develop these skills when there are only two or three books

Resources for library projects 223

available on the topic, and the logistical problems of having a whole classof students trying to use the same few books are overwhelming. More-over, projects are usually most successful when they involve group work,and this also depends on having sufficient sources of information to pro-vide a genuine reason for sharing the work between group members.

These were problems which we faced in the Bell Educational TrustForeign Language Centre at Beijing Forestry University, where we werepreparing Chinese graduates for overseas study. The programmeincluded a project-based course designed to provide training in the studyskills required in extended research. The projects would, it was hoped,simulate the kind of work the students would be likely to encounter intheir postgraduate courses. We began with seven project themes: popula-tion, food, energy, pollution, computers, climate, and geology. Thesewere deliberately left open-ended, so that individual groups of studentscould narrow down the topic according to their own particular specialitiesand interests. We found considerable difficulty, however, in resourcingthe projects. Although we had a small library of specialist textbooks, thenumber and range of books was too limited to allow realistic practice ofinformation retrieval skills. In trying to supplement this, we were forcedto rely increasingly on 'popular' science texts taken from New Scientistand Scientific American. The majority of these articles, however, werevery different from the type of materials that a postgraduate studentwould consult—in style, organization, length, and use of references. Stu-dents, too, were aware of this lack of authenticity, which may havereduced their motivation for the project work. In an attempt to overcomethis problem, we began to develop a 'mini-library' specifically designed tosupport one of the projects.

The success of this approach led us to develop the system further on a pro-fessional course for overseas students organized by the Bell LanguageInstitute at Queen Mary College in London. Here there was no shortageof academic materials; on the contrary, the problem was a library whichwas too large, and thus initially bewildering for students who were onlybeginning to develop information retrieval skills in English. For the stu-dents, it would have been extremely difficult to identify relevant textsfrom the vast array of often highly specialized materials, while for theteachers, it would have been extremely difficult to keep track of what thestudents were reading and thus to monitor progress and provide appro-priate support where necessary. This situation is particularly problematicon a pre-sessional course where time is limited and teachers may them-selves be unfamiliar with the library. Another 'mini-library' was thereforedeveloped, this time catering not for one project theme, but for six:development, population, energy, human rights, colonialism and liter-ature, and pollution. Students were free to select their project theme and,within this theme, their particular area of interest; the range of materialshad of course to reflect the range of potential sub-topics.

The next part of this article describes the system we developed to providea 'mini-library' specifically designed as a resource base for project work, a

224 Sarah North

system which may be used either in Britain, to provide control and guid-ance until students are able to exploit the resources of a full academiclibrary, or overseas, to supply suitable resource materials in situationswhere these are otherwise unavailable.

A 'mini-library' A mini-library tries to reproduce as far as possible the features of a fullfor project work academic library, but on a smaller scale. This reduction of scale operates

in three aspects:

1 Range of subjects: A mini-library does not attempt to cover all possiblesubjects, but is restricted to materials relevant to the project theme orthemes. One important consideration, however, is that the range must bewide enough to allow the possibility of selecting an irrelevant text (other-wise students would never need to use appropriate information retrievalskills). If the mini-library is built up to deal with only one project theme, itmay therefore be necessary to include some red herrings, in the form ofirrelevant or only marginally relevant texts.

2 Specialization: Whereas a full academic library will include materials ata very sophisticated level of specialist knowledge, this is generallyunnecessary for a mini-library (except perhaps in a narrow-focus ESPsituation). The materials should be at an academic level suitable for thestudents, and sufficiently varied to cater for differences in their interestsand background knowledge.

3 Length of text: A normal library contains mainly books, but a mini-library contains mainly shorter texts, again with sufficient variation tocater for the different abilities of the students. Some of the materials,however, should be longer than a student could reasonably be expected toread, thus necessitating the use of skimming and scanning techniques.

Sources of material Having chosen a theme or themes for a project, the next step is to collect avariety of texts to be included in the mini-library, bearing in mind the cri-teria noted above. The availability of suitable materials will vary fromone situation to another, but possible sources include (in no particularorder):

—extracts from EFL textbooks, reading workbooks, and graded readers;—articles from newspapers, journals, and periodicals;1

—publicity and educational material from commercial and charitableorganizations—this is often supplied free or at very low cost to edu-cational institutions;

—extracts from school or university textbooks, or other available refer-ence books.

In addition, if it is possible to allow self-access to audio-visual resources,then the mini-library may also include non-book materials such as videofilms and audio cassettes. The final source of materials is the studentsthemselves, who can be encouraged to bring along any additionalmaterial which they have tracked down while researching their projecttheme.

Since only one copy of any text is needed, it is often possible to use the


original materials (if necessary, by cutting up the book or periodical).Where photocopying is necessary, this must be in accordance with localcopyright law; in Britain, for example, it may be carried out under theterms of the licensed copying scheme.2 When making copies, it is useful toretain as many features of the original as possible (for example, headings,diagrams, bibliography), and in particular to retain the original pagenumbers, which will be needed when the students write their own refer-ences for the material they have consulted.

Cataloguing andstorage

Figure 1

Each item in the mini-library will need to be catalogued and, if possible,the system used should be the same as that which students will have to usein their future studies. A friendly librarian may be willing to help withcataloguing, but failing this, the job can be adequately done by a teacherarmed with the subject index for the library system adopted (see, forexample, Winslade, 1977). If neither of these two measures is possible,then it may be necessary to devise an ad hoc cataloguing system for themini-Library. Once each text has been catalogued, it should be markedwith its class number.

To allow the students to develop information retrieval skills, an index tothe materials will also be needed, arranged according to subject headingsas in a normal library system. This can be either a card catalogue, or aword-processed list resembling a microfiche, which can be pinned on anoticeboard or issued to each student group. Ideally, materials will becontinually added to the system, so the catalogue will have to be updated.Items in the mini-library which are extracts from larger works must eachbe given their own title (for example, a chapter heading), which appearsin the subject catalogue along with the title of the work from which it hasbeen extracted, but in all other respects each entry should follow normallibrary conventions, as in the (fictitious) example in Figure 1.

POPULATION — DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

DUMBLE, Edgar.

Urban populations in Africa

In: Demography of the Developing World.

Edinburgh: Pluto Press, 1981.

P. 108-12 301.32

To protect the materials, it is advisable to place each text in a plasticcover. They will not, of course, stand upright on a shelf, so are best storedin box files, a filing cabinet, or a cardboard box, arranged in order of classnumber. Students could be allowed open access to the materials, but this

226 Sarah North

might lead to disordering, damage, or loss of the materials. A simple bor-rowing system will not only avoid these problems, but also allow theteacher to monitor the students' work more easily.

Borrowing system A convenient system for lending materials to students uses borrowingslips similar to those used in a library for reserving books, as in theexample in Figure 2.

Figure 2 LOAN VOUCHER

AUTHOR

TITLE OF BOOK/PERIODICAL

CLASSIFICATION

BORROWER (Block Capitals)

DATE BORROWED

BORROWER'S SIGNATURE

To borrow any text, a student must complete one of the forms, and is thusgiven practice in identifying the relevant features of a catalogue entry.The slip is handed in to the teacher, who issues the material and retainsthe slip; this provides a record both of what the students are reading, andof the current location of the materials. It is advisable to make a rule thateach student can borrow only one text at a time. This helps to ensure thatthe materials circulate reasonably freely among the students; moreimportantly, however, it prevents students from direct copying in their

Table 1 Phase Project work Skills involved

1 Orientation The teacher explains the aims of theproject and, where relevant, allowschoice of project theme.

2 Introduction Class work using general reading orlistening texts to introduce theproject theme. Group discussion todecide on specific topic and on theallocation of research tasks.

3 Research Individually, or in pairs, studentscollect data from the mini-librarymaterials, make notes and exchangeinformation with others in thegroup. This phase may be extendedwhere appropriate to lead into useof a full library.

4 Seminar Each group prepares a seminar talk Oral presentation;and presents it to other students for Discussion,discussion.

5 Writing Students draft and edit their written Writing.papers, individually or in groups.

Intensive reading;Listening;Discussion;Reference skills.

Reference skills;Extensive reading;Intensive reading;Note-taking;Discussion.


final report or essay, and thus encourages them to keep notes of what theyhave read.

Using a mini- There are many ways of running a project, but most of them reflect thelibrary pattern of activities, shown in Table 1, in which certain phases may be

omitted according to the needs and abilities of the students and the timeavailable. (See also Robinson, 1978.)

This pattern indicates a gradually increasing amount of student auto-nomy, but the extent to which students are required to work independ-ently can be varied by adjusting the balance between class, group, pair,and individual work, and by providing more support such as accom-panying worksheets for the texts. The teacher can also set deadlines forstudents to submit interim work such as the notes for their seminar pres-entation or a first draft of the written paper. This provides a tighter frame-work for the students, and has the added advantage of making the finalcorrection of papers much less onerous. Finally, students must, of course,be adequately prepared in the specific skills involved in the project work.Here the study skills textbooks mentioned above can be useful in intro-ducing skills, such as consulting a catalogue or using note cards, whichwill then be practised within the more realistic context of the project.

Conclusion By replicating many of the features of a normal library, a mini-libraryallows students to practise information-retrieval skills in a purposefulway, as part of an integrated programme of work. For most EAP stu-dents, it has a highly motivating effect, since they realize its relevance toreal-life situations, and appreciate the opportunity to follow their ownparticular interests through a range of authentic materials. Although ofparticular value in a library project, where the development of academicstudy skills is a major priority, the versatility of a mini-library may alsomake it a useful resource for other types of project work.

Received October 1988

NotesI should like to thank Andy Hopkins, RichardRossner, and Ray Williams for their helpful com-ments on a draft of this paper.1 Photocopies of journal articles can be obtained

from the British Library Document Supply Centre,Boston Spa, Wetherby, West Yorkshire LS23 7BQ.

2 Details are available from the Copyright LicensingAgency, 7 Ridgmount Street, LondonWC1E 7AE.

ReferencesBAAS. 1983. Ideas for Egg Races London: British

Association for the Advancement of Science.Carter, G. and H. Thomas. 1986. ' "Dear Brown

Eyes" . . .': experiential learning in a project-orientated approach' ELT Journal 40/3: 196-204.

Fried-Booth, D. 1982. 'Project work with advancedclasses' ELT Journal 3612: 98-101.

Gee, S., M. Huxley, and D. Johnson. 1984. 'TeachingCommunication Skills and English for AcademicPurposes: a case study of a problem shared', inWilliams, R., J. Swales, and J. Kirkman (eds.)Common Ground: Shared Interests in ESP andCommunication Studies (ELT Documents 117).Oxford: Pergamon.

Hamp-Lyons, L. and K. Berry Courter. 1984.Research Matters Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House.

Herbolich, J. B. 1979. 'Box kites' English for SpecificPurposes 29. Reprinted in Swales, J. (1985) Epi-sodes in ESP Oxford: Pergamon.

Horey, P. 1983. 'Task-based English language learn-ing: principles and practice' ELC OccasionalPapers 1. Jeddah: King Abdulaziz University.

228 Sarah North

Jones, K. 1982. Simulations in Language Teaching Wray, D. 1985. Teaching Information Skills throughCambridge: Cambridge University Press. Project Work Sevenoaks: Hodder and Stoughton.

Lewis, M. 1983. Projects Hove: Language TeachingPublications.

O'Brien, T. and R. R. Jordan. 1985. DevelopingReference Skills London: Collins.

Robinson, P. 1978. 'Projects' in Pre-sessional Courses The authorfor Overseas Students London: The British Sarah North has a Diploma in Teaching EnglishCouncil/English Teaching Information Centre. Overseas from Manchester University and an MA in

UTMU. 1976. Improving Teaching in Higher Edu- Linguistics from the University of Reading. She hascation London: University Teaching Methods taught in Indonesia, Singapore, Tanzania, andUnit. China, mainly in ESP and EAP, and is now a senior

Wallace, M. 1980. Study Skills in English Cambridge: lecturer in the International Education Centre at theCambridge University Press. College of St. Mark and St. John, Plymouth,

Winslade, B. A. J. 1977. Introduction to the Dewey involved in ESP teaching and teacher training. HerDecimal Classification for British Schools (3rd edi- Current interests include academic writing skills andtion). School Library Association/Forest Press. pedagogic grammar.
