Iraqi EFL teachers’ perceived difficulties in implementing CLT in Iraqi schools

الملخص EN

Abstract 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.

Hence, this study is designed to investigate the Iraqi EFL teachers’ understanding of English teaching, predominantly the difficulties and challenges they face in the implementation of CLT practices in the Iraqi context.

This study first investigates the definition and principles of CLT In addition, a review of existing literature related to communicative competence, as well as how it functions in CLT is presented.

Participants for this study were sixty Iraqi teachers of English teaching at primary and secondary levels.

The main modes of data collection consisted of questionnaire .The results show that Iraqi EFL teachers 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, Iraqi 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.