The use of communicative language teaching (CLT): Turkish EFL teachers' perceived difficulties in implementing CLT in Turkey

CLT has been widely explored and studied by many researchers in the field of English language teaching. There have been many studies conducted on the use of CLT in EFL settings. However, there are only few studies in number that specifically deal with CLT and its implementation in the Turkish context. Hence, this study was designed to investigate the Turkish EFL teachers’ understanding of English teaching, predominantly the difficulties and challenges they face in the implementation of CLT practices in the Turkish context. This study first presents an overview of English language teaching in Turkey, and then investigates the definition and principles of CLT which is followed by a brief history of CLT. In addition, a review of existing literature related to communicative competence, as well as how it functions in CLT is presented. Furthermore, this study examines the impact of ESL vs. EFL contexts on the implementation of CLT methodology. A mixed methods research design was used for this research. Participants for this study were sixty-one Turkish teachers of English teaching at primary and secondary levels. The main modes of data collection consisted of online questionnaire and semi-structured and informal interviews. The results show that Turkish EFL teachers, whilst aware of the achievements, observe many difficulties in implementing CLT in their classrooms. These difficulties stem from four directions, namely, the teacher, the students, the educational system, and CLT itself. The results suggest that despite showing keen interest in change and being eager to identify with CLT, Turkish teachers are not rather optimistic about the complete adoption of CLT, and thus feel that only by overcoming the difficulties from those four sources, and by establishing more favorable conditions for the implementation of CLT can teachers truly benefit from CLT in their English classrooms