The Relationship Between EFL Teachers’ Attitudes Towards CLT and Perceived Difficulties of Implementing CLT in Language Classes in Omani Context

Abstract

The present study investigated the relationship between EFL teachers’ attitudes in Omani context towards Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and perceived difficulties of implementing CLT in language classes. Twenty four EFL teachers participated in the study. Their attitudes towards CLT and their perceptions of the problems of implementing CLT were assessed by two questionnaires. The results of the descriptive statistics showed that EFL teachers had positive attitudes towards CLT in general and group work in communicative classes in particular. Further, while EFL teachers generally did not find much difficulty in implementing CLT in language classes, they found the difficulties the educational system creates as a major obstacle to use CLT. Moreover, CLT attitudes and perceived difficulties of CLT implementation were not found to be related; however, when subscales of CLT attitudes and perceived difficulties questionnaires were considered, four correlations were found to be statistically significant. Difficulties caused by teachers in communicative classes were found to be inversely and significantly related to (a) attitudes towards group and pair work (r = −.530 and p = .011) and (b) attitudes towards CLT quality/quantity of error correction (r = −.455 and p = .033). Further, attitudes towards the role and contribution of learners in the learning process were found to be negatively related to students’ related difficulties and challenges (r = −.468 and p = .021) and attitudes towards CLT-Quality/quantity of error correction were also found to be negatively related to students’ related difficulties and challenges (r = −.502 and p = .013).