Communicative language teaching in the Thai classroom context : teacher's and students' attitudes and perceptions on the applicability of CLT

Abstract

This study investigated teachers’ and learners’ perspective towards the Communicative Language Teaching Approach (CLT). The purpose of this study is to investigate the attitudes of Thai teachers and the perceptions of Thai students towards aspects of teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL) based on CLT, and whether or not CLT is applicable for teaching English in the Thai classroom context. Twelve Thai EFL teachers and 376 Thai EFL students from twelve secondary public schools in Bangkok, Thailand were participants. Based on both the quantitative and qualitative approaches, questionnaires were conducted in order to investigate the teachers’ and learners’ attitudes and perceptions towards CLT. Moreover, individual telephone interviews were conducted to study the teachers’ perceptions of the applicability of teaching CLT in the Thai classroom context. The results show that both the teachers and students have positive, favorable attitudes towards CLT. They claimed that CLT is applicable for a Thai classroom context. However, the findings further reveal that bringing CLT into practice still has some limitations in terms of class size, and students’ proficiency. Further investigation on how these limitations can be taken into account when applying CLT to teach in the Thai classroom context is needed.