The Implementation of Educational Projects in Social-action-based Learning

CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) sets the goal of training social actors in language teaching, which implies a shift from the communication paradigm to the social action paradigm or from training successful communicators, who are involved in exchange of information in contact situations, to training social actors, who can live together harmoniously and act together effectively in their multilingual and multicultural societies, but the same CEFR does not elaborate on how to realize this rupture in and/or outside the classroom. This paper proposes that there are two ways of training social actors: mini-projects, which can be employed by language textbooks or curricula, and educational projects, in which the students are involved as autonomously as possible in their design, implementation, and evaluation. The paper focuses on the distinctive characteristics of educational projects which differentiate them from the communicative tasks and then presents the stages of the application of educational projects in social-action-based learning (the action-oriented approach).


Introduction
The action-oriented approach is referred to as social-action-based learning (SABL) throughout this article to indicate the rupture between the communicative approach (both in its weak and strong versions) and social-action-based learning (the action-oriented approach) since the action referred to by SABL is social action and not speech acts of the communicative approach.
The Council of Europe attempted to initiate two paradigm changes in language learning goals set for the European citizens. The first paradigm change emerged with the first Threshold Level document 'The Threshold Level in a European-Unit/Credit System for Modern Language Learning by Adults' as was developed by Van Ek (1975) for the Council of Europe to prepare the European citizens for a short term contact with the natives of the target language, mainly in touristic visits. As a result, the communicative approach was developed to meet this goal, the goal of developing learners' communicative skills to enable them to carry out successful communication with the people of the foreign language. In this paradigm, the criterion of success became the successful exchange of information in these interactions. In short, the goal was to train successful communicators as Van Ek (1975, p. 2) states in the foreword of this document: "Nevertheless, by far the largest single group of learners, everywhere, consists of people who want to prepare themselves, in a general way, to be able to communicate socially on straightforward everyday matters with people from other countries who come their way, and to be able to get around and lead a reasonably normal social life when they visit another country. This is not simply a matter of buying bread and milk and toothpaste and getting repairs carried out to a car. People want to be able to make contact with each other as people, to exchange information and opinions, talk about experiences, likes and dislikes, to explore our similarities and differences, the unity in diversity of our complicated and crowded continent".
The second paradigm change as reflected by the action-oriented approach introduced by CEFR (2001) and its companion volume (2018) emerged as a result of an increased economic and social integration process among the European countries beginning in the 2000s. This continued integration process resulted in setting a new language learning goal for the European citizens by the Council of Europe, that of not only communicating with the natives of the target language in touristic visits but also of living and working together with foreigners from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. In short, the goal was to train social actors. This new goal, however, is not even noticed by some researchers, who cite the Council of Europe in their articles. Demirezen (2011), who wrote "The Foundations of the Communicative Approach and Three of Its Applications" at a time when the Council of Europe had already initiated the second paradigm change with this goal in CEFR (2001), still displayed a commitment to the communication paradigm. This language learning goal, that of training social actors, however, has a broader educational goal than that of the communicative approach, namely, educating democratic citizens of Europe, who can live and work together in their democratic society. CEFR companion volume (2018, p. 26) (2008)7)". Van Ek (1975, p. 9) outlines the characteristics of the target learners for which the Threshold Level document was developed as follows: "1. they will be temporary visitors to the foreign country (especially tourists); 2. they will have temporary contacts with foreigners in their own country;

The Characteristics of Action in CLT and SABL
3. their contacts with foreign-language speakers will, on the whole, be of a superficial, non-professional type; 4. they will primarily need only a basic level of command of the foreign language". Thus, the objectives described in the Threshold level take as their basis one reference objective: to be able to communicate with foreigners in a foreign language; one reference situation: tourist trip; and one reference action, which is language interaction (speaking with the other) (Puren, 2014a(Puren, , 2014b(Puren, , 2014c. The objectives are written as what the learners will be able to do with the foreign language in such initial and short-term contact situations. Thus, learners of English will be able to communicate with foreigners they meet for the first time in short term contact situations through acts of speech. This reference objective (to be able to communicate), reference situation (tourist trip), and reference action (language interaction) specify the fundamental characteristics of the communicative approach or what Puren (2020, p. 16 The action ends completely.
Dialogues always end at the end.

The punctual
The action lasts for a short time.
-In the dialogues, it is always the same people in the same place speaking on the same topic of conversation in the same limited time.
-The characters rent a hotel room much more often than an apartment. They never buy an apartment or a house.

The individual
The exchange is between one person and another.
The reference group for the activities is the minimum group for interaction: the group of two; the interaction is actually inter-individual. short-term encounters (e.g. touristic visits) but set the goal of training learners as social actors, who can live together harmoniously and work together effectively in a multilingual and multicultural society. The approach presented in these two documents, the actionoriented approach, however, is sometimes still misinterpreted as the communicative approach or task-based language teaching.
Yeni-Palabıyık & Daloğlu's (2016) study titled "English language teachers' implementation of curriculum with action-oriented approach in Turkish primary education", for example, ignores the fact that the 2013 Turkish ELT curriculum for primary and secondary schools claims to be based on the action-oriented approach but the curriculum has nothing to do with the action-oriented approach as can be seen easily in the quote from the curriculum below: "As no single language teaching methodology was seen as flexible enough to meet the needs of learners at various stages and to address a wide range of learning styles, an eclectic mix of instructional techniques has been adopted, drawing on an action-oriented approach in order to allow learners to experience English as a means of communication, rather than focusing on the language as a topic of study". (p.II) The authors of the curriculum misinterpret the action-oriented approach as having the goal of allowing learners to experience English as a means of communication, which is a communicative objective rather than action-oriented. Indeed, the authors of the 2013 ELT curriculum state, in one of their publications about the development of this curriculum, that "the newly developed curriculum, in accordance with the principles of Communicative Language Teaching and the CEFR, gives primacy to spoken language in grades two through four, with the main emphasis on the development of oral-aural skills" (Kırkgöz, Çelik & Arıkan, 2016, p. 1207. The misinterpretation of the action-oriented approach as communicative language teaching by the developers of the 2013 ELT curriculum is observed in this quote, which Yeni-Palabıyık & Daloğlu (2016) fail to observe. Besides, Zorba & Arıkan (2016) state elsewhere that "Taskbased learning has a significant place in the CEFR. In fact, the action-oriented approach that the CEFR adopted is based on tasks" (p. 18). "This book has therefore sought to theorise the underpinnings of the AoA and to explain why, as for example Bourguignon (2006), Puren (2002, 2009) and Richer (2009 argue, the AoA cannot be seen as synonymous with TBLT, as is sometimes assumed". (p. 276) In fact, Puren (2002Puren ( , 2004Puren ( , 2006Puren ( , 2014b, long before the authors of the CEFRCV, as they already acknowledge, indicated that the action-oriented approach could not be equated with either the communicative approach or task-based language teaching since the characteristics of action in the CLT and TBLT were quite different from those of social-action-based learning (the action-oriented approach). Recently, Puren (2020), once again, draws attention to the rupture between the communicative approach and SABL, which is seen in table 2 below: As seen in the table, the characteristics of social action that the social actors are involved in are different from the characteristics of speech action (threshold level document and CLT) that the learners as communicators are involved in. The characteristics of social actions, which the social actors display both in their mini-society (the classroom) and/or the outside society, are repetitive, durative, imperfective, and collective. While the simulated situations of communicative use are abundantly employed by the communicative approach to train learners as communicators, in SABL, social action situations are necessary to train learners as social actors, and educational projects are the best models of social action for the social actors since they allow the social actors (learners) not only to live together but also to act together in and/or outside their mini-society (the classroom). In fact, this rupture can also be observed in the following quote from the CEFR (p. 9): "The approach adopted here, generally speaking, is an action-oriented one in so far as it views users and learners of a language primarily as 'social agents', i.e. members of society who have tasks (not exclusively language-related) to accomplish in a given set of circumstances, in a specific environment and within a particular field of action. While acts of speech occur within language activities, these activities form part of a wider social context, which alone is able to give them their full meaning. We speak of 'tasks' in so far as the actions are performed by one or more individuals strategically using their own specific competences to achieve a given result".
As Puren (2006Puren ( , 2011 already indicated the implications of this quote, while the communicative approach views the classroom as an artificial environment (hence the use of simulations to bring the outside world into the classroom to allow the learners to communicate in the classroom as if they were in the outside society) and hence the students are just learners, social-action-based learning (the action-oriented approach) views the users and learners of a language as social actors and thus the classroom is no longer an artificial environment but a real mini-society, where the social actors (learners) act together (social action) as real citizens to give a product or display a performance. While the communicative approach focuses on language tasks, preferably communicative tasks since communicative interactions involve language, in social-action-based learning, tasks are not only linguistic (e.g. creating a product).
The action targeted in the communicative approach is speech action, which is an act on the other, but in social-action-based learning, speech actions are meaningful only in relation to social action, which is an act with the other (acting together). It is, thus, the social actions which are the reference actions of the action-oriented approach (hence the use of the term socialaction-based learning in this article), which means communication is put at the service of social action. In the communicative approach, however, communication is both the means and the goal. Thus, the correct interpretation of this short passage from the CEFR is enough to understand the rupture between the communicative approach (as well as task-based learning) and social-action-based learning (the action-oriented approach). This rupture is never observed in both the 2013 and 2018 ELT curricula of Turkey, which are dominated by the communicative approach (though both are eclectic) as the developers of the 2013 curriculum also clearly state: "To accomplish this, the program was designed to encompass a communicative approach to language teaching, highlighting the forms and lexis of English in reallife contexts in order to create relevance in learners' daily lives". (Kırkgöz, Çelik, Arıkan & 2016, p. 1205 This is a statement that is the opposite of the claim made in the title of the article by Yeni- Palabıyık & Daloğlu (2016) "English language teachers' implementation of curriculum with action-oriented approach in Turkish primary education".
What made Zorba & Arıkan (2016, p. 18) claim, incorrectly, that "Task-based learning has a significant place in the CEFR. In fact, the action-oriented approach that the CEFR adopted is based on tasks" is that the authors of the CEFR use the term "task" but they define the task differently from the proponents of task-based learning that of Nunan (1989), Estaire and Zanon (1994), Willis (1996), Ellis (2003). The task is defined, in the CEFR, in terms of action: "any purposeful action considered by an individual as necessary in order to achieve a given result in the context of a problem to be solved, an obligation to fulfill or an objective to be achieved" (p. 10). CEFR can be criticized by employing the term "task", which misleads some researchers (e.g. Zorba & Arıkan, 2016) to think that it is task-based learning. Insisting on the use of the term "task" to indicate a new orientation (the action-oriented approach) as different from taskbased learning is thus not so appropriate. Puren (2004Puren ( , 2009Puren ( , 2014aPuren ( , 2014bPuren ( , 2019b, in this respect, is right to differentiate between task and project (as well as mini-project) and to propose mini-projects and educational projects as two possible implementations of social-action-based learning (the action-oriented approach) in and/or outside the language classes. These two terminologies are helpful to mark the departure from the communicative approach as well as task-based learning and they also represent the real nature of social action as different from communicative action. The picture is clearer as regards making the difference between tasks of task-based learning, and mini-projects and educational projects of social-action-based learning (the action-oriented approach) as shown in table 3 outlined by Puren (2014b) below: Table 3 Analysis grid of the different current types of implementation of the action in foreign language textbooks Action Perspective Task-based language teaching (communicative tasks)

Weak Version Strong Version (action tasks) (mini-projects)
Strongest Version (project pedagogy) Acar (2020aAcar ( , 2020b gave sample mini-projects as can be employed by language textbooks and the next section of this article explains how educational projects can be implemented beyond any textbook or curriculum since projects in SABL can not be limited by the time frame of the textbook or curriculum, nor can they be imposed on the social actors (learners) by an outside authority (teacher, textbook or curriculum).

Educational Projects in Social-action-based Learning
To Puren (2009), in the implementation of social-action-based learning (the action-oriented approach) in terms of project pedagogy, "all student activities are organized according to 'educational projects' which have a real (and not simulated) dimension and which they design and conduct themselves with the help of the teacher" (p. 126). Puren (2014b) illustrates the differences between communicative tasks and educational projects as shown in table 4 below: Table 4 Communicative tasks and educational projects Task-based language teaching (communicative tasks) The action-oriented approach (educational projects) 1. The act of reference is the communicative task: it involves managing communication situations through language interaction, the main issue being the exchange of information. The characteristics of this action are those of the tourist trip: the inchoative, the punctual, the perfective and the individual.
The act of reference is social action. The characteristics of this action are, contrary to those of the tourist trip, the repetitive, the durative, the imperfective and the collective. The action is of the order of complex: relevant to the process, requiring metacognition and feedback ("project management").

Tasks are predetermined by the teacher/textbook.
Actions are chosen and designed by the learners (with the help and under the control of the teacher) at the beginning of the project. Learners plan and organize their own work.
3. Competencies are defined and worked in terms of language activities (listening, reading, spoken interaction, spoken production, writing), speech acts (acting on the other by language) and language action (pragmatic competence).
Competence is defined and worked primarily as a complex ability to act, requiring, in particular, the articulation and combination of different language activities.

The reference company is the external foreign company (e.g. France for French as a foreign language learners)
Learners are considered as such as full-fledged social actors, engaged with teaching in a project (teachinglearning). Homology between class and external society is instituted in the very organization of the class: Council, presidents, and secretaries of meetings, persons in charge (of the mail, the library, a group, a workshop,...).
5. The tasks are done in simulation. The actions are real: inter-school correspondence, class newspaper (printed in the classroom print shop, and distributed outside), presentations, debates, exhibitions, dossiers, leaflets,... 6. We only target a language objective: communicative competence.
We also aim to achieve an educational goal: the training of a real citizen as a social actor autonomous and supportive, critical and responsible, in a democratic society.
7. The linguistic objectives of each unit/ didactic sequence are defined first in terms of communication situations and/or in terms of notionalfunctional content Projects are not limited by the time frame of the unit or the didactic sequence, nor are guided upstream by predetermined language objectives. They are negotiated with the teacher, who integrates the language objectives into his/her own criteria.
8. The cultural objectives are the meta cultural (knowledge), and intercultural (usually in the narrow sense of intercultural comparison) components of cultural competence.
The privileged cultural component is the co-cultural component: the ability to adopt/adapt a culture of collective action in the classroom/in external societies/professional circles. All components of cultural competence are likely to be mobilized.
9. Language and cultural content are entirely predetermined by the teacher/textbook. The task(s) is (are) conceived as opportunities for reuse of these contents. The variations in language and cultural content worked are within the chosen theme.
The language and cultural contents are introduced according to the actions and worked in relation to these actions.
10. Communication is both the goal and the means: model dialogues are used; information management stops when the communication is successful.
Communication is a means at the service of action: no dialogue or another document model of production. The communicative objective is integrated into the objective of informational competence (i.e. the ability of a social actor to act on and through information), the management of the information integrating post-and pre-communicative activities.
11. Priority is given to interindividual interactions: the reference group is the group of two.
The reference groups (or the large group) are "project groups", where all the decisions are made and where all the activities concerning the project(s) are carried out. The organization in groups and sub-groups is instituted in the class according to the types of activity: production teams workshops, working groups. The "large group" dimension is instituted in the "Council", place of mediation and collective bargaining.
12. The tasks remain entirely managed and operated within each group. The large group may be used as public during the performance of the simulated scene.
Individual work is systematically encouraged and facilitated in parallel with group activities: selfcorrecting lexicon, reading, writing files. This individual dimension is also established: Personal work plans 13. The documents are all provided to learners. 13. All documents are searched for and selected by the learners themselves. The learners' productions are considered as documents in their own right, which can be integrated into the documentation and/or used in a collective way (the free texts of the students are linked in albums available in the "Library of class") or individually (work of a student on the text of a letter he received from his correspondent).
14. The documents are treated as a priority according to the language activity concerned ("support logic").
Documents are treated primarily as resources for action ("documentation logic"). All "documentary logics" are likely to be implemented.
15. The use of L1 is avoided. 15. L1 is introduced when it helps to carry out the action (e. g. part of the documentation in L1) or to project it in the learners' society(ies) (e.g. L1 translation of the final production and dissemination in the learners' country). Activities related to language mediation are planned.
16. The evaluation is mainly done on the individual productions of the learners.
The evaluation takes into account not only the work done ("product" dimension), but also the realization of the work (the "process" dimension ).
The evaluation criteria specific to social action are added as priorities: the success of the action and the "professional" quality of the production. Table 4 shows the differences between the characteristics of communicative tasks and educational projects. The most striking characteristics of educational projects in social-actionbased learning (the action-oriented approach) are that the actions are chosen and designed by the learners (with the help and under the control of the teacher), thus, they can not be imposed on the social actors (learners) by the teacher, textbook or curriculum; and there is a preference for real action rather than simulated actions as in the communicative approach both in its weak (threshold level document) and strong versions (task-based learning). As to the implementation of educational projects in and/or outside the classroom, Puren (2019a) presents these stages of a project in figure 1 as follows: At the beginning of the project, the students will ask, collectively, questions and provide answers: What will we have achieved at the end of our project? What resources will we have needed? What successive tasks should we have performed? How will we be organized? What difficulties might we have encountered? How could we have overcome them? On what criteria of success would we have guided ourselves? (Puren, 2017). This is a kind of brainstorming, but it must lead to immediate decisions in terms of designing the action to be carried out. Thus, proaction is the cognitive operation which corresponds to the design stage of a project and it determines the precise definition of the action, the objectives of the action, the specification of the final linguistic product(s), the resources needed for realizing the action, and the planning This is not, then, the evaluation of the students' success because, in the final evaluation of a project, the success of the action is the main criterion, but the evaluation of the available knowledge and resources. It aims to answer the questions: What do we need to know and master and what resources do we need before starting our project? and what should we have known and mastered to succeed in our project? (Puren, 2017).
The second cognitive operation carried out by the students is metacognition, which is operating at the implementation phase of the project. In a metacognitive activity, the students can think together about how to carry out the intermediate tasks effectively during the implementation stage. Thus, metacognition is not another stage of a project but just a cognitive operation used in the second stage of a project (implementation).
In the implementation stage of the project, students carry out intermediate tasks they distributed among themselves in the design stage. Like the design stage of the project, in the implementation stage, each intermediate task is put to evaluation (this time formative) as to how they will be performed, are performed, or have been performed (in a recursive process).
This evaluation serves to monitor the intermediate tasks for possible remediation through activity monitoring form.
The last stage of the project covers evaluation, which is basically summative. It is also retrospective in that it enables the learners to review the whole stages of the project and forwardlooking since it gives students experience for future projects as Puren (2017, p. 6) argues: "The final evaluation of a project is a summative evaluation, but it is also retrospective in that it feeds the metacognition applied to the entire realized project in such a way as to critically review the design, implementation and evaluations of the project. It is also forward-looking: its summative and retrospective perspectives are intended to draw lessons for future projects".
The traditional lesson design follows the paths of presentation-practice-production (PPP). With task-based language teaching, this design is reformulated as pre-task, task, and post-task, though it is a matter of debate among task-based methodologists what these stages should include (e.g. Prabhu, 1987;Nunan, 1989;Willis, 1996;Shekan, 1996;Ellis, 2003). In the implementation of SABL in terms of project pedagogy, the path to follow is designimplementation-evaluation, and there are cognitive operations like proaction and metacognition operating at the design and implementation phases. The design stage of a project does not correspond to the presentation stage of the traditional presentation-practice-production model nor the pre-task stage of the pre-task, task, and post-task model. In the implementation of socialaction-based learning (the action-oriented approach) in terms of project pedagogy, it is the students who (with the help and under the control of the teacher) take as much responsibility as possible in the design of the projects so they become more and more autonomous. The design stage of a project, therefore, cannot be directed by the teacher, textbook, or curriculum. The fact that the design stage of a project does not correspond to the presentation or pre-task stages, however, does not mean that there is no support to learners in project pedagogy. Puren (2009) argues that support by the teacher (and/or textbook and other resources) is necessary before, during, and after the implementation of the social action (project). Such support before the implementation of the project (or preparation phase of the project) is necessary to enable the social actors to be equipped with the linguistic and cultural resources for them to be able to implement the project. The evaluation of a project involves individual and collective selfevaluation by the students as well as evaluation by the teacher and even public evaluation (if the final product is published e.g. the school newspaper or put into a public exhibition, theatrical performance or song night). The other important point is that the stages of a lesson in both the PPP model and task-based language teaching are carried out within a limited time frame of a lesson (one or two class hours) or textbook. The stages of a project, on the other hand, cannot be carried out in such a limited time frame of a lesson and textbook but are realized in a large time frame (e.g. one or two months, the whole semester or even a whole year depending on the complexity of the project). Finally, projects do not function as a tool of communication in the classroom. On the contrary, all types of language activities and tasks (communicative or pedagogical) carried out in and/or outside the classroom are put at the service of the social action, project (e.g. school newspaper).

Conclusion
To become social actors, the students have to move from involving in a simple exchange of information (talking with the other) to acting together to give a product (acting with the other).
This, however, does not mean that communication disappears in the project since it is obvious that the social actors (learners) have to communicate well to act effectively with each other, but the status of communication changes: it is no longer the means and the objective (as in the communicative approach), but only a means at the service of the objective, which is the social action. This change in status is the consequence of the paradigm shift, from the communication paradigm to the social action paradigm. There are distinctive characteristics of projects that reflect the real nature of social action and which differ them from the communicative tasks.
Thus, the implementation of social-action-based learning (the action-oriented approach) in terms of project pedagogy differs extensively from both the communicative approach and taskbased language teaching. In language teaching and learning, a transition from the reference situation of tourist travel, for which the first threshold level document was prepared, and also from its reference action, which is the language interaction described in terms of speech acts, to the reference situation of a multilingual and multicultural society, where the students will live and work together in a democratic manner (for which CEFR was developed), and to its reference action, which is social action (acting with the other) will be best reflected by the implementation of social-action-based learning in terms of project pedagogy.

Statements of ethics and conflict of interest
"I, as the Corresponding Author, declare and undertake that in the study titled as "The Implementation of Educational Projects in Social-action-based Learning", scientific, ethical and citation rules were followed; Turkish Online Journal of Qualitative Inquiry Journal Editorial Board has no responsibility for all ethical violations to be encountered, that all responsibility belongs to the author/s and that this study has not been sent to any other academic publication platform for evaluation."