Iraqi EFL teachers, supervisors and students’ perception of CLT principles and practices at Iraqi schools: A study of its benefits, snags, and future directions

Abstract

Even though in recent decades a bulk of studies have been accomplished on the use of communicative language teaching (CLT) in English as a foreign language (EFL) environments, fairly a limited numbers of studies precisely dealt with investigating the attitudes of language teachers, students and supervisors concerning the principals of CLT in the context of Iraq. Henceforth, this study was designed to delve into the attitudes of teachers, learners and supervisors about the implementation. To this end, the study was accomplished using a mixed method design. The present study was carried out in two phases: designing and using a questionnaire plus interviewing the teachers, students and supervisors (51 language learners, 41 teachers and 28 supervisors), the researcher selected three language institutes of Al-Diwaniyah Iraq. The findings disclosed that although both groups of participants held favorable attitudes toward CLT, teacher participants had significantly higher levels of perception regarding CLT tenets in terms of the role of grammar, the learner’s role, the teacher’s role, and error correction and evaluation. Nevertheless, no significant differences were found between language learners, teachers and supervisors concerning group/pair work and native language role.