“An investigation into Saudi teachers’ perceptions of CLT and students’ preferences for teaching practices”

Abstract

It has been observed that communicative language teaching (CLT) has become popular internationally, for the purpose of using language to communicate. The desire to use the language to communicate has increased among learners around the world who want to develop their English language skills, particularly because English is an international language. However, there are some obstacles which prevent this approach from being applied in many countries where English is taught as a foreign language (EFL). This study focuses on English secondary school female teachers in the city of Hail in Saudi Arabia. The participants were 13 teachers and 40 students. Their English classes were observed and both students and teachers completed questionnaires while teachers were also interviewed. This research aimed to find out about teachers’ perceptions of CLT and the difficulties that prevent them from applying this approach in the Saudi Arabian teaching context. It also investigated students’ preferences for teaching activities in order to discover whether these matched with CLT or not. However, the findings show that the teachers recognised some features of CLT, although they also hold some misconceptions about it, such as the b3eleif that CLT involves teaching speaking only, and thus there are some problems elated to teachers, students, the educational system, and CLT itself which prevent them from applying this approach. Nonetheless, both the teachers and students showe3d a desire to use this approach within their learning and teaching contexts in order to help improve students’ communicative skills. Therefore, in order to apply this teaching methodology successfully, these problems need to be resolved, for example, by offering sufficient and appropriate teaching-training for teachers and introducing learners for this new approach gradually.