Teachers' attitudes towards communicative language teaching: A case of soran EFL classrooms

Communicative Language Teaching urges the shift from structure-based classrooms into more communicative ones. Numerous EFL classrooms have developed CLT into their contexts. Nevertheless, the practice of CLT encounters many challenges in English as a foreign language setting in the last decade. Even though the teachers' attitudes play a major role in the implementation of CLT, no studies have focused on the matter in Iraqi context yet. This mixed methods study aims at exploring Iraqi EFL teachers' attitudes towards Communicative Language Teaching. The study was conducted in Soran town, the northern part of Iraq. The participants of the study were 58 EFL teachers from secondary and high school classrooms. In the first phase, a five-point Likert-scale questionnaire was administered (Karavas-Doukas, 1996) to examine EFL teachers' attitudes towards CLT principles; "Place/importance of grammar, group/pair work, quality and quantity of error correction, the role of the teacher in the classroom, the role and contribution of learners in the learning process." The second phase of the study was semi-structured interviews to examine the reasons behind the implementation of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in terms of the factors that hinder and encourage the CLT implementation in Iraqi EFL setting. The results of the quantitative phase revealed that the teachers held a positive attitude towards overall attitude and five subscale of CLT: overall attitudes (Max=91.00; Min=63.65; Mean=76.29), place/importance of grammar (M=2.96), group/pair works (M=3.33), Quality and quantity of error correction (M=2.96), the role of the teacher in the classroom (M=3.25) and the role and contribution of learners in the learning process (M=3.31). The findings of interviews phase concluded that there are four main factors that cause the failure and success of CLT classroom in Iraq; Educational factors, teacher factors, student factors, and CLT factors. The results of the study suggest that educational system and teachers' communicative competence are essential to promote CLT classrooms. Keywords: Iraqi EFL classrooms, CLT, teachers' attitudes, communicative competence.