Recently, the need for communicative competence in English has been increasing; therefore,
English at the elementary school level has focused on the communicative abilities of children in
real-life situations. There have been various teaching methods proposed to achieve this purpose.
Among them, problem-based learning, which starts with real life problems, is one of the methods
used to improve children's real life communicative skills and interests. The purpose of this study
was to discover the effect of PBL on the listening and speaking abilities of students in real-life
situations. To achieve this purpose, two groups were selected from fifth graders in an elementary
school which is located in Seoul, Korea. For four weeks, the experimental group were taught
using PBL, and the control group were taught using conventional methods based on the national
curriculum. In the PBL group, the student's reactions were observed and analyzed in the process
of the PBL. At the end of the study, the communicative abilities of the students were evaluated
through problems which reflected listening and speaking abilities in real-life situations. The
results of the test were analyzed with an independent sample t-test using the SPSS/WIN statistics
program. The results indicate, first, that the listening scores of the experimental group, to which
problem-based learning had been applied, was higher than that of the control group; but the
difference between the two samples was not statistically significant. Second, the speaking score
of the experimental group, to which PBL had been applied, was higher than the control group;
and the difference between the two samples was statistically significant. We can conclude,
therefore, that elementary English classes based on problem-based learning are an effective
method of increasing the speaking abilities of children in real-life situations.