Communicative Language Teaching in the Yemeni EFL Classroom from Teachers’ Perspective

This paper aims at the effectiveness of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in Yemeni EFL classrooms from the teacher's perspectives. Yemeni instructors have been using traditional methods to teach English. Their students achieve higher educational levels, but still are not capable of communicating effectively. For this reason, CLT was first introduced in 1993 in the pre-service training for teachers. After that, everything changed starting from the official guidelines, including textbook designs, but not the teaching methods of the teachers. They faced a dilemma of how to shift from a structure based approach to a communicative based approach. Within the same vein, this paper aims at finding: (1) to what extent Yemeni teachers are knowledgeable of CLT, (2) the application of CLT in Yemeni classrooms (3) learners' attitudes towards CLT use in the classroom. To answer the above mentioned questions, the researchers opted for a questionnaire which was answered by 40 Yemeni teachers. The results obtained show that teachers in Yemen have some knowledge about CLT, although they do not tend to use it in their classrooms. As for the implementation of CLT, Yemeni teachers said that its use is related to other variables such as visual aids, training, etc. for these reasons, CLT is not used in Yemeni classrooms. Yemeni students, on the other side, get motivated when they were taught using CLT. They feel at ease in the classroom for one simple reason, that is CLT encourages low proficiency learners to participate in activities. This paper ends up by presenting some limitations of the study.