Project-Based Language Teaching in Kenya's Competency-Based Curriculum: Structural Alignment, Implementation Tensions, and a Design Framework

Kenya's Competency-Based Curriculum articulates ambitious language education goals but provides language teachers with little methodological guidance on how to achieve them. The curriculum demands that learners develop integrated, demonstrable communicative competence through purposeful, collaborative activity — yet the pedagogical approaches available to most Kenyan teachers operate at the level of individual lessons and discrete tasks, which cannot generate the cumulative competency evidence the curriculum's assessment framework requires. This paper argues that project-based language teaching (PBLT) addresses this gap because its organising logic — extended inquiry, collaborative production, embedded assessment, authentic driving questions — corresponds to the curriculum's own structure of learning as a progression toward integrated competence. Drawing on communicative language teaching theory, sociocultural theory, and activity theory, the paper analyses the alignment between PBLT principles and competency-based curriculum design, examines the structural tensions that arise in Kenyan classroom implementation, and proposes the Competency-Anchored PBLT Framework (CA-PBLT) as a practical design tool. The paper concludes that the principal obstacles to PBLT implementation in Kenya are institutional rather than pedagogical, and identifies directions for empirical follow-up research.