Beliefs and Attitudes of Pre- and In-Service Teachers towards Communicative Language Teaching in Challenging Times: A Case of West Libya
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.61841/2qd16y55Keywords:
Communicative language teaching, EFL practicum, EFL pre-service teachers, EFL teacher beliefs, EFL teacher attitudes, languages pedagogy, postmodern eraAbstract
This article explores EFL pre-service teachers’ beliefs and attitudes towards communicative
language teaching (CLT) and how it is implemented in Libya. It is common that all universities
send pre-service teachers to schools for teaching observations and teaching practice as part of
their preparation for teaching. However, in Libya,the EFL teacher workforce is underprepared
because the teaching of English was banned from 1986 to 1998 (Asker, 2012) and subsequent
professional development opportunities lacking. Besides being under pressure to cope with
changing requirements in pedagogy and practice to focus on communicative language
teaching,this challenge is exacerbated by the recent, rapid growth of schools and free public
education. This also creates a dilemma for pre-service EFL teachers on practicum, since their
mentor teachers are likely to be teaching traditional grammar-translation method
(Assalahi,2013), while their mentees should be focused on CLT. Moreover, the pre-service
teachers’own English language learning experience would have been the traditional approach in
contrast to their university program that advocates CLT. Thus, to investigate the impact onthe
effectiveness of the practicum experience a case study was conductedusing an establishedLikert
style survey ofpedagogical beliefs and attitudes. Two independent groups of pre-service teachers
and in-service teachers through convenience sampling completed this.The findings showed
thatboth groups weresomewhat contradictory and inconsistent intheir beliefs about five CLT
principles and potentially lacked in-depth awareness of how they appear in classroom EFL practice. Their responses also provided insights into the barriers to implementing CLT, which
related to large class sizes, long term personal experience of the grammar translation method,
students’ expectations and lack of professional learning of ISTs. These findings can be used to
reform policy and develop EFL teachers’ professional learning, as well as reviewInitial Teacher
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