Attitudes Toward Communicative Language Teaching: The Case of EFL Teachers in Iquique, Chile

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to learn the attitudes that English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers working in public, subsidized and private high schools from Iquique, Chile, have toward Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). Fifty-eight high school EFL teachers from three types of schools in Iquique participated in a quantitative non-experimental survey research answering a questionnaire based an attitude scale by Karavas-Doukas (1996). The scale, which measured five principles of CLT, group/pair work, error correction, role of the teacher, role of the learner, and importance of grammar, underwent reliability and exploratory factor analyses, revealing internal consistencies which led to remove the subscale of role of the teacher. A 3 x 2 ANOVA analysis, with types of school and participation in the courses from the English Opens Doors Program (EODP) as independent variables, was used to analyze the data. Statistically significant differences were found in the attitudes toward error correction (p = .031), in relation to EODP participation, and in the attitudes toward the importance of grammar (p = .028), in relation to types of school. In general, teachers showed positive attitudes toward only three principles of CLT; thus, a generalization of the attitudes to the whole concept of CLT cannot be made, in part, as the principle of the role of the teacher was not considered. The positive attitudes demonstrate that teachers might be using CLT in their classroom, meeting the objectives in the Chilean National English Curriculum. Nevertheless, a further study must be conducted to confirm this hypothesis.