English Scholarship Beyond Borders, cilt.9, sa.1, ss.23-34, 2023 (Scopus)
This paper aims to illustrate the difference between the implementation of projects in communicative textbooks and action-oriented textbooks. I conclude that many communicative textbooks place projects at the end of the units as an attachment to the unit so that the students start doing the project after they complete the unit. I also conclude that projects in many communicative textbooks function only or primarily as reuse activities, just as final tasks, which will allow students to reuse the language content of the unit. In action-oriented textbooks, on the contrary, the textbook unit is actually a project as a whole, so that the students can, initially, appropriate the planned project scenario with the possibility of modifying it, and then they can begin the project at the beginning of the unit, implement it during the unit and finalize the project at the end of the unit even if the project scenarios are placed at the end of the units. Although the projects in action-oriented textbooks also allow students to reuse the language content of the unit, the ultimate goal of the projects in these textbooks is to train learners as social actors. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2022 English Scholars Beyond Borders conference at Ton Duc Thang University in Vietnam.