The relationship between EFL Teachers’ Attitudes towards CLT and Perceived Difficulties of Implementing CLT in Language Classes

The present study investigated the relationship between EFL teachers’ attitudes towards CLT and perceived difficulties of implementing CLT in language classes. Two hundred and three 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, three correlations were found to be statistically significant. Difficulties caused by students in communicative classes were found to be inversely and significantly related to (a) attitudes to CLT as a whole (r=-.160, p<.05) and (b) attitudes towards group/pair work in CLT (r=-.156, p<.05). Further, attitudes towards the role of teacher in a communicative class were found to be positively related to difficulties inherent in the CLT method itself (r= .181, p<.01).