PRACTICE OF COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING IN SILTI WOREDA

Abstract This study was conducted in descriptive survey method which was aimed at examining the extent of grade 9 English students’ and teachers’ practice of communicative language teaching in Silti woreda secondary schools. 173 grade 9 students and 8 grade 9 English teachers were participants of the study. To select students’ simple random sampling and to select teacher participants’ comprehensive sampling technique was used. Quantitative and qualitative data were used in this study. Quantitative data were collected from 149 questionnaire responses of grade nine students and from 32 sessions of classroom observation and qualitative data were collected from 3 teachers’ and 6 students’ interview responses. Quantitative data were analyzed by using statistical tools such as frequency and percentage and the qualitative data gained from interview were analyzed qualitatively. The study revealed that, although CLT approach has been adopted by many teaching materials including text books in our country, this study result indicates that the current situation of language teaching method in the study context is far below CLT principles. Teachers apply form focused language teaching in their real classroom practice. The finding also depicted that, low level of teachers’ language proficiency, students’ low participation in classroom activities, teachers’ inadequate in service training,, large class size, time shortage to cover communicative activities, and test oriented teaching trend are major challenging factors to practice CLT. Finally, it was recommended that, the extent of CLT practice in Silti woreda secondary schools call for concerned bodies to solve problems identified in this research and to full fill different instructional and pedagogical materials that can be helpful to promote practice of CLT.