PERCEIVED PROBLEMS IN USING COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING (CLT) BY EFL IRANIAN TEACHERS

According to Harmer (2001:86) CLT is prejudiced in favor of native–speaker teachers by demanding a relatively uncontrolled range of language use on the part of the students, and thus expecting the teachers by demanding them to be able to respond to any and every language problem which may come up. In this paper thus, it was tended to find out whether Iranian EFL high school teachers are at ease when using CLT in their classes or not. That is, whether Iranian teachers are capable of utilizing comprehensive approach named CLT in their classes to achieve its ultimate goal, communication in real context. 50 participant teachers teaching English at high school were given a questionnaire to express their view points about the probable difficulties they might encounter when using CLT. In addition to the questionnaire, each teacher was interviewed for about 5 minutes so they might express their ideas live on the probable constraints in applying CLT in their genuine classes. Then the data collected by means of the interview and the questionnaires were analyzed. It was concluded that the main sources of problems in CLT implementation by the Iranian EFL teachers are: problems caused by the teachers, difficulties coming from the students, pitfalls created by the educational system, and hurdles caused by the CLT approach itself.