Participatory Approach of Teaching English

Chapter I

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) as a base of the Participatory Approach

1.1.1 Paulo Freire’s Participatory Approach

"There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an

instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present
system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means by
which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the
transformation of their world."
—Richard Shaull, drawing on Paulo Freire
Although it originated in the early seventies with the work of Paulo Freire, it was not until the
early 1980s that the participatory approach started being widely discussed. 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 world' (Freire and Macedo 1987 in Auerbach 1992). Education is not value free; it occurs
within a particular context. Freire suggests that teachers carry out his participatory approach in
the ESL classroom through problem-posing, a central operational mode of critical pedagogy, in
three cyclical stages: naming, reflection, and action (Wink, 1997). According to Freire, naming
materializes "through observation and recognition of a problem through discussions with
students". Reflection, on the other hand, "requires the situating of the problem in space and time
and in relation to the individual and the larger society". Lastly, "action provides a means of
redressing the problem". Throughout the book named Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. Bergman
Ramos, Trans.). NewYork: Continuum.(1970), which was the base of the creation of the
Participatory Approach, Freire encourages his readers to take part in this process. He explains
that the real action, however, is in bringing a new understanding into classroom practices:
"recreating education in a way that becomes a truly democratizing force for all those whose lives
you touch, bringing about the realization of the action element: social justice" (p. xvi). Freire
recognizes that language teaching is a highly situated activity located in specific contexts, in his
case multicultural college or ESL classroom.  the idea of approaching language teaching through
a participatory stance is refreshing and inspiring. Berlin's effective instruction model and
participatory framework compel ESL teachers to reflect on and re-examine their perspective on
the roles and functions of teachers, students, and the language classroom. From his perspective,
the classroom is a dynamic, interactive stage where teachers and students act as co-constructors
of knowledge while pursuing education for democracy.

1.2 The role of the participatory approach in TEFL

Education is most effective when it is centered on experience and related to the student’s real
needs. Students are motivated feeling themselves centered and experts on their own lives.
Teachers are co-learners, asking questions about student’s everyday occupations. Students learn
to see themselves social beings, a part of the society they interact. It is rather easier for the
student to express his opinion if he completely penetrates in the topic that is discussed. This
happens when if the discussion in which he participates, touches his own experience. The goal of
the participatory approach is to help students to understand the social, historical, or cultural
forces that affects their lives, and then to help empower students to take action and make
decisions in order to gain control over their existence as an element of the society. For students,
a goal of the participatory approach is to be evaluating their own learning and to increasingly
direct it themselves. “The language focus in the participatory approach is not established in
advanced, rather, it follows from content which itself emerges from ongoing, elaborative
investigations of critical themes in students life. As Auerbach (1992:14), puts it (real
communication accompanied by appropriate feedback that subordinates form to the elaboration
of meaning, is key of language learning).” The quality of education depends, to a large extent, on
the quality of teachers involved in its development and delivery. A quality teacher will
acknowledge the needs and interests of the pupil, permit the pupil to learn at his/her own pace,
encourage learning through doing and where necessary provide remedial and enrichment
instruction among others. The participatory approach centers the student with his own world of
thoughts that he won’t be against to share with others. The complicity is that he constantly
doesn’t know about his hidden desire to speak about something that happens in his life. The goal
of the teacher as the user of the participatory approach in this case is to awake the students desire
to share his thoughts with the surroundings practicing EFL. The difference between the
information learned at home, as for example a text on the cultural topic, and the information that
the student exposes as the part of his life experience, for example an opinion essay, is in the
grades of simplicity. The second one being easier reproduced by a student because he will know
exactly what is he talking about. On the other hand we speak about two different processes,
learning and expression. The participatory approach is more connected with expression,
statement which is based on the general learning of EFL and has a didactic goal to increase it.
However, it is important to note that learners are different and they learn through different ways.
Therefore, there is no single method or technique on its own which can satisfy the learning needs
of all the learners. In order to cater for the needs of all the learners, it is necessary for the teacher
to vary the methods of teaching, and the teacher can easily do it by using a participatory
approach because it is directed in developing the speaking skill by using the best way which is to
speak, appropriate for any type of learner.

1. Approaches that make the communication central in TEFL

Teaching techniques can be different regarding teaching language to individuals, particularly

when we speak about the process of teaching second languages to students. Communicative
language teaching is different from other approaches because it focuses on student interaction
with the teacher and other students as a means of creating language skills in a new
language. This clearly is different from other forms of teaching language, first of all because its
major goal, as the name implies, is communication. Instead of long lessons of memorization and
drilling in a new language, communicative language teaching relies on the participation of the
student in conversation with the instructor and other students as a means of making the new
language relevant to the student and therefore easier to learn and recall. “Communicative
language learning facilitates learner memory of new language skills through its use of
relevance. This refers to the fact that individuals will learn the new language for a range of
different purposes. Further, the goal of such teaching is to create learner competence so that an
individual feels ready to use the new language for communication. Often, such communication
includes an introduction to reading materials that clearly use language differently, such as the
language used in reports as opposed to the language used in magazines. In this way, all the
techniques described in the use of communicative language teaching are familiar and the
criticism of the approach often comes from what is not included, rather than the failure or fallacy
of techniques that are used.” (>>>>) It is important to organize the communication learning in a
right way. Firstly, the communication must be the most useful for learning, secondly it must be
based on the student’s knowledge otherwise it can cause trouble for the students to express
themselves and the teacher will be only one who is involved in communication. To simplify the
organization of the right communication the CLT (Communicative Language Teaching) provides
different techniques, methods and approaches. They refer to both processes and goals in
classroom learning. The central theoretical concept in classroom teaching is “communicative
competence”, in which competence is defined as expression, interpretation and negotiation.
Hence we can underline three main approaches in CLT : Content-based approach, Task-based
approach, and the Participatory approach. All three have a common goal and are used together as
an indivisible part of CLT.

a) Content-based approach

Whole Language educators believe that students learn best not when they are learning language
piece by piece, but rather when they are working to understand the meaning of whole texts. In
other words, students work from the 'top-down’ attempting first to understand the meaning of the
overall text before they work on the linguistic forms comprising it.

Of course, when students study academic subjects in a nonnative language, they will need a
great assistance in understanding subject matter texts; therefore, there must be clear language
objectives as well as content learning objectives. Because the language objectives are dictated by
the texts, content-based instruction rightfully fits in with the other methods in this chapter where
the selection of the language arise from a communicational needs, and the theme is elected due
to the situation. Content-based approach is built on students’ previous experience. When learners
perceive the relevance of their language use, they are motivated to learn. They know that it is a
means to an end, rather than an end in itself. Language is learned most effectively when it is used
as a medium to convey informational content of interest to the students and the vocabulary is
easier to acquire when there are contextual clues to help convey meaning. As an example of a
lesson in which the content-based approach is involved, can be the one where academic subjects
are learned through the medium of a foreign language. For instance, students can study
geography and English at the same time. With the help of this the teacher has an opportunity to
supply the students missing vocabulary on this topic, but students would increase their
knowledge about geographical unit, learning the new vocabulary which would be better
remembered because of its usage as a part of a general idea about the topic and not as a separate
group of new words.

b) Task-Based Instruction

As with content-based instruction, a task-based approach aims to provide learners with a natural
context for language use. As learners work to complete a task, they have an opportunity to
interact. Such interaction is thought to use language in speech as learners have to work to
understand each other and to express their own meaning. Doing so, they have to check to see if
they have comprehended correctly and, and in case if they don’t, they have to seek clarification.
By interacting with others, they might be listening to language which may be beyond their
present ability, but which may be assimilated into their knowledge of the target language for use
at a later time. As Candlin and Murphy (1987: 1) note, The central purpose we are concerned
with is language learning, and tasks present this in the form of a problem-solving negotiation
between knowledge that the learner holds and new knowledge.' Otherwise speaking, the task-
based approach is learning by doing several tasks, it deals with an information-gap activity. The
opinion-gap activity requires that students give their personal preferences, feelings, or attitudes
in order to complete a task. For instance, students might be given a social problem, such as high
unemployment and be asked to come up with a series of possible solutions. Another task might
be to compose a letter of advice to a friend who has sought their counsel about a dilemma. In
case if the students are only at the advanced-beginning level, their opinion-gap task is a rather
simple one which involved students' surveying their classmates about their favorite subjects. An
information-gap activity might involve a student describing a picture for another student to draw
or students drawing each other’s family trees after sharing information. A reasoning-gap activity
requires students to derive some new information by inferring it from information they have
been given. For example, students might be given a railroad timetable and asked to work out the
best route to get from one particular city to another or they might be asked to solve a riddle.
Generally, the task-based approach has a wide use in TEFL. Even the brainstorming can be
named as a method of a task-based approach.

Conclusion

Participatory Approach was originated with a work of Paulo Freire in early

Chapter II

Strategies and technics for implementing the participatory approach