The Pros and Cons CLT in Formal Education System of Iran

In this paper, we aim to scrutinize the on-going "communicative" trend applied by the ministry of education in its recently published series of "Prospect", designed for junior high-school level. To elicit the pros and cons of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in Iran, besides reviewing the literature previously published on the subject, we have done the in-depth interviews with a group of twenty highly experienced teachers. The findings of the discussion show that although younger generation of English teachers have a supportive and positive attitude toward the CLT approach in Iran, some serious shortcomings threaten the whole program. To name the most critical one, teacher training courses are evaluated as both drastically insufficient and irrelevant to the needs of teachers. In terms of the material, the findings show that great number of practitioners already busy teaching "Prospect" series face problems in implementation level. Though the series includes a formal teachers' guide, apparently many of the teachers are unfamiliar with it. The interpretation of the collected data and interviews suggests that although the necessity of shifting to communicative approaches such as CLT in atmosphere of Iran's public education system has been demanded by both university scholars and teachers, this does not necessarily mean that the way is paved for this paradigm shift. In general, the success of the new trend is highly conditioned to the way the ministry support it both in software and hardware strata. Findings and suggestions of this article can be found interesting for both policy makers and material developers.