ENHANCING BUSINESS ENGLISH MAJOR STUDENTS’ VOCABULARY KNOWLEDGE THROUGH PROJECT-BASED LEARNING: A CASE STUDY OF THE 4TH YEAR STUDENTS STUDYING ENGLISH FOR TOURISM
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This study aimed; to 1) investigate the effectiveness of project-based learning on students’ level of vocabulary knowledge, and 2) find out the students’ attitudes towards project-based learning. The participants included 16 fourth-year students enrolling in the academic year 2019 at the Faculty of Liberal Arts, Southeast Bangkok College. There were four males and twelve females, aged 21-22. A quantitative analysis of the participants’ written essays, using Cobb’s Lextutor Vocabulary Profiler, explored if there were any differences in the level of vocabulary knowledge between pre-project and post-project essays. The findings revealed that the students’ level of vocabulary knowledge improved significantly and the students had positive attitudes towards project-based learning. The results showed that the participants significantly used less K1 words in their post-project essays which reflected their better level of vocabulary. In addition, the students showed their improvement of vocabulary knowledge by using more K1 families and K1 types in their post-project essays. Moreover, the students significantly used higher number of AWL words in their post-project essays. According to the results, it can be concluded that classroom activities such as searching information for creating an end product throughout project-based learning such as the exploration of data for creating tourism advertisement, tourism itinerary, and tourism marketing helped students acquire more academic words.
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