Longman Dictionary of

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progressivism
progressivism n
see RECONSTRUCTIONISM
project work n
(in teaching) an activity which centres around the completion of a task, and
which usually requires an extended amount of independent work either by
an individual student or by a group of students. Much of this work takes
place outside the classroom. Project work often involves three stages:
1 Classroom planning. The students and teacher discuss the content and
scope of the project, and their needs.
2 Carrying out the project. The students move out of the classroom to
complete their planned tasks (e.g. conducting interviews, collecting
information).
3 Reviewing and monitoring. This includes discussions and feedback sessions
by the teacher and participants, both during and after the project.
In language teaching, project work is thought to be an activity which
promotes CO-OPERATIVE LEARNING, reflects the principles of STUDENT-
CENTRED TEACHING, and promotes language learning through using the
language for authentic communicative purposes.
projection (principle) n
In some models of Generative Grammar, e.g. Chomsky’s UNIVERSAL
GRAMMAR, a lexical item in the lexicon (see LEXICON 3 ) of a grammar, e.g.
a verb, has specific information about syntactic categories (complements)
which it ‘projects’ onto the structure of the sentence. For example, the
English verb give has two complement noun phrases:
give [-NP 1 , NP 2 ]
which it can project, e.g.:
She gave the accountant the file.
The influence of the properties of lexical entries only goes up to a certain
structure in the sentence, e.g. a verb would have influence on the
whole verb phrase (VP) but not beyond it. This is often called maximal
projection. Points of maximal projection are often shown by ``(two bars)
(see BAR NOTATION), e.g. V`` (VP), N`` (NP), P`` (PP prepositional
phrase).
The DOMAIN of an element in a sentence is considered to be the area
within its particular maximal projection. For example, in the sentence:
Bill took her to an expensive restaurant.
the domain of the verb take (took) would be the whole verb phrase (V``),
including her to an expensive restaurant, the domain of the preposition to
would be the whole prepositional phrase (P``), including an expensive
restaurant.
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