PARTICAPATORY APPROACH

v  Participatory approaches are a product of long lasting interaction between researchers, development workers, government agents and local populations.

v  History of Participatory Approach

In the early 1960s, Freire developed a native-language literacy program for slum dwellers and peasants in Brazil. Freire engaged learners in dialogues about problems in their lives. These dialogs not only became the basis for literacy development, but also for reflection and action to improve students' lives.

Freire believed that 'education is meaningful to the extent that it engages learners in reflecting on their relationship to the world they live in and provides them with a means to shape their (Freire and Macedo 1987 in Auerbach 1992).

v  The goal of the participatory approach is

to help students to understand the social, historical, or cultural forces that affect their lives, and then to help empower students to take action and make decisions in order to gain control over their lives (Wallerstein 1983).

v  Conclusion

Learning to communicate by communicating, rather than by preparing to do so through practicing the various pieces of language, is a different way to approach the goal of developing students' communicative competence.