The Implementation of Communicative Language Teaching by Kurdish EFL Student-Teachers at Colleges of Education

Abstract

In modern education, English language teaching has been going through various methods and approaches stating the journey with grammar- translation method, direct method, audio- lingual method, content-based, task-based and participatory approaches, and reaching communicative language teaching (CLT). Having appeared since the 80s, CLT still maintains its popularity in English language teaching contexts. It is one of the most popular and dominant approaches used in the world of teaching English. In Kurdistan, CLT has been used and adopted in the 2000s. English courses have been redesigned following the communicative approach principles. EFL student-teachers are supposed to implement CLT while they practice teaching during the assigned period of time. They took a course named methodology in which the focus is on CLT. In addition, fourth year students had another class called 'View' in which students visit schools to observe teaching English. To the researchers' knowledge, no studies have investigated the extent to which this approach has been applied by student-teachers at the College of Education and Basic Education.
 The purpose of this study is to observe and describe how the communicative approach is being applied by EFL student-teachers in high school classrooms. Therefore, the problem of the study can tacitly be expressed in the following question: to what extent the CLT approach is implemented among the student teachers in teaching Sunrise. The study is a qualitative study because it describes the student teachers' behaviors while teaching Sunrise. Two tools have been utilized. An observation scheme COLT (Communicative Orientation of Language Teaching) is used to collect the data. Nine students are observed for one lesson in 2020. Besides, a questionnaire is delivered to twenty EFL instructors at the College of Education and Basic Education. In the light of the findings, it becomes apparent that CLT is not implemented by the majority of the student teachers. Finally, Recommendations are suggested to solve this problem.