An Exploration of English Language Teaching Pedagogy in Secondary Yemeni Education: A Case Study

The teaching of English at the Yemeni public schools has been criticized as ineffective due to the poor level of the language competency of most school leavers though they spend six years studying English whose curriculum, according to Bose (2002), is largely based on the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). In this respect, this paper mainly attempted to: 1) investigate Yemeni English teachers’ classroom teaching practices in secondary schools, (2) Explore the Yemeni teachers’ awareness of CLT, and 3) explore the constraints teachers face while implementing the CLT. The results of the study indicate that the Grammar Translation Method (GTM) is the predominant pedagogy practiced by the EFL teachers participated in this study. The use of the mother-tongue, both by teachers and students were noticed to be the prevailing. The meanings of words are given in Arabic and the teachers do not focus on developing students’ fluency rather they focus on grammar. The results also show that the participants do not have a clear cut idea regarding the principles and concepts of CLT and are not clear about what they do in the classroom. The constraints faced by the participants while implementing CLT are also investigated and presented in the paper.