Learners’ Perceptions and Attitudes toward Communicative Language Teaching in Turkish EFL Contexts

I have been working on my bachelor paper with two colleagues for five months from September 2011 to January 2012. It is about the implementation of Communicative Language Teaching in Turkish schools. It has been handed in as a thesis paper completing the necessities of graduating from ELT department, in Mersin University in 2012. All rights are reserved by Gamze Cokluk, Ferhat Kurt and Ugur Aslan.

Now, the educational system  in Turkey has changed a lot after the regulations in 2012, but it will be the focus of another entry. Here, i'll post the abstract first! Later, i'll go on publishing my paper! If you are interested in reading the whole paper, please contact me by commenting or sending an e-mail to "aslanugur01@gmail.com"

Learners’ Perceptions and Attitudes toward Communicative Language Teaching

in Turkish EFL Contexts

Abstract

Communicative Language Teaching was introduced to Turkish education system in 1997 and since then it has been highly appreciated by curriculum makers as well as language teachers.  However, there occur constraints in implementation of CLT in Turkish EFL settings even though the new Turkish EFL curriculum adopts a communicative approach to language teaching.  The present study is motivated by the review of previous literature revealing that although there are many studies dealing with teachers’ perceptions and attitudes toward CLT, few studies focused on the learners’ perceptions and attitudes toward communication-based instruction.  Consequently, the purpose of the present study is to find out a group of EFL learners’ perceptions and attitudes toward CLT in terms of instructional focus. 

The present study is conducted in ELT department of Mersin University with 148 preparatory and freshman students.  A Likert-type questionnaire, which was originally developed by Savignon and Wang (2003), was adopted and administered to collect data.  Data gathered by means of questionnaires were analyzed descriptively.  The findings of the study suggest a mismatch between learners’ classroom practices and their preferences in terms of instructional focus.  Most of the learners expressed that their high school EFL practices were mainly grammar-focused and they reported highly negative attitudes toward these practices.  The discrepancy between learners’ experiences and their actual preferences of instructional focus results in difficulties in implementation of CLT.