Educational Alternatives, Volume 14, 2016

Abstract: This study intends to investigate English teachers’ perception and attitude toward various aspects of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and the difficulties they faced in implementing this teaching approach. Data was collected through an attitude scale and interviews with the participants. Analysis of the data revealed that most of the teachers had favorable attitudes with some reservations toward four domains of CLT: group/pair work, grammar, student/teacher roles, and peer/teacher correction. The results also showed that the difficulties encountered by teachers were teacher-related, student-related, and educational-system related. Teacher-related constraints included teachers’ deficiency in spoken English, strategic and sociolinguistic competence, lack of cultural knowledge, lack of training in CLT, and lack of time to prepare communicative materials. Student-related constraints included students’ low proficiency, and educational-system related limitations consisted of large classes and grammar-based examinations. The findings of this study, which corroborated those of previous studies, suggest that many of the difficulties encountered by Chinese English teachers over the past two decades still persist to this day.