An Exploration into Perceptions of Junior Secondary School English Teachers towards Communicative Language Teaching and Their Actual Classroom Practices: Grade 8 in Focus
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Date
2010-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Researches reveal that teachers’ perceptions play an influential role in determining their professional behavior: the way they plan their lessons, the kinds of decisions they make, the way they react towards different methodologies and the specific method they apply in their classrooms. This study has, therefore, tried to present perceptions of junior secondary school teachers towards communicative language teaching (CLT) and their actual classroom practices with a special reference to Grade 8 English teachers.
Both quantitative and qualitative methods of research have been used for the study. And the required data have been collected from twenty English teachers working in three different elementary schools using the three research tools: questionnaires, observations and interviews. Descriptive statistics such as mean, percentage and frequency have been utilized in analyzing the data obtained through the questionnaires while the observations and interviews were analyzed qualitatively in words.
As a result, it has been found out that the aforementioned teachers have, in fact, a strong perception towards CLT in principle, but when it comes to practice, almost all of them have been found to fail in holding their strong perceptions towards the same. In other words, a clear mismatch has been noticed between teachers’ perception towards CLT and their actual classroom practices. And this is attributed to the multidimensional problems pointed out in the conclusion part of the paper.
Mindful of the identified problems, therefore, an earnest and persistent supervision of the schools with regard to the implementation of CLT by the concerned government and non-government bodies is forwarded as a major recommendation at the end of the day
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Teaching and Their Actual Classroom Practices: Grade 8 in Focus