A Study of Thai Teachers’ Perceptions Toward the Implementation of Communicative Language Teaching of English

Abstract

          This study explored the perceptions of Thai teachers toward the implementation of Communicative Language Teaching in their English classrooms. Despite the Thai government promoting CLT in English classrooms since the 1990s, Thai teachers still struggle to bring their students to communicative competency. This study interviewed 6 in-service teachers who currently utilizing CLT about their experiences in order to gather insight into the difficulties that many Thai teachers were facing in utilizing this approach to teaching English. These interviews also intended to provide a better understanding of EFL teaching methodology in the Thai classroom and to emphasize the need for EFL teachers in Korea to build students’ abilities to communicate in English. The findings of the study were that the subjects found it difficult to use English textbooks to promote communicative competence as the textbooks were not selected with the purpose of setting CLT objectives. Also, teachers often find it difficult to utilize communication oriented activities as they feel burdened to prepare their students, through the teaching linguistic elements of English, for the National Entrance Examination. Furthermore, teachers often feel burdened by large class sizes and do not feel adequately trained to implement Communicative Language Teaching successfully.