An Investigation of the Efficiency of In-service Programs on Iranian EFL Teachers‟ CLT Perception

In recent years Communicative Language Teaching has gained a lot of interest by many EFL syllabus designers teacher trainers and teachers As a result of a paradigm shift in Iranian ELT from that of GTM to CLTthe necessity of teachers professional development programs which aims at shifting teachers attitudes thereupon their teaching practice is undeniable Moreover as it is agreed on by most scholars among the influential elements in every educational pedagogy are the teachers and their perceptions and attitudes in receiving accepting and adapting new ideas and paradigm shifts The review of the related literature suggests that one of the fundamental reasons of failure in putting principles of any curriculum innovation into practice lies on failing to make positive influence and improvement on teachers attitudes This study is one of sate of the art in this respect since unlike the existing research in the literature which are limited just to some private language schools it inspected a national official language syllabus It examined the efficiency of teacher training inservice programs on Vision teachers attitude the IRIs new English language textbooks To achieve this goal a mixed method design was employed In the quantitative phase of the study 92 high school English teachers were asked to respond to an adapted version of CLT attitude questionnaire developed by Karavas Doukus In the qualitative phase of the study six teachers three male and three female took part in semistructured interviews concerning their beliefs about CLT and their perceptions of barriers in implementing CLT The results of this study revealed the fact that Iranian teachers positive attitude toward the principles of CLT is highly influenced by their professional development and could be heightened by their participation in teacher training inservice program