Communicative Language Teaching: Observation of the English as a Foreign Language Classrooms in Thailand

165 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1987.The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which the communicative approach had been applied in English classes in Thai secondary schools. Three secondary English classes were selected for the investigation. Each was identified by the supervisor of the Supervisory Unit as the class in which the approach had been best used.Limited participant observation was the method used to collect data. Each class was observed four hours a week for four weeks. The teaching/learning activities were coded for activity types, student organization, language skills, content, and materials used. Teacher and student verbal interaction was recorded, transcribed and coded for the following communicative features: target language used, infomation gap, sustained speech, reaction to code/message, and incorporation of preceding utterances.Findings of the study indicated that there were differences in (a) the types of activities used, (b) the ways students were organized, (c) the focus of content, and (d) language skills practiced. Text-type materials were used in all three classes. For teacher and student verbal interaction, significant differences were found in the communicative features of target language use, information gap, and incorporation of preceding utterances, but not in the feature 'sustained speech'.The results of the study provided evidence to the fact that different degrees of the approach had been applied in each class.The observation procedures and recording instruments used in this study proved to be valid and reliable means to record events occurring in language classes and provided opportunities for teachers to improve their instruction.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD