Teachers's application of the communicatuve language teaching approach in selected secondary schools of Mufulira District,Copperbelt Zambia

The study aimed at establishing teachers’ classroom application of the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach to English language teaching. The study was anchored on four objectives namely: teachers understanding of CLT, Teachers classroom application of CLT, teachers attitudes towards CLT, and the challenges faced by teachers when using CLT to teach English in secondary schools. A qualitative research design was employed through the use of face to face interviews, document analysis and lesson observations. 40 teachers of English who were purposively sampled participated in the study. The findings were analysed thematically. In respect to theory, Constructivism, Critical Discourse Analysis and Pedagogical Discourses theories framed the study.
The findings from the study indicated that teachers had low to moderate understanding of the Communicative language teaching method. Other teachers held misconceptions about the method which further misguided their classroom application. One misconception that the teachers held was that CLT encouraged errors and neglected grammatical correctness of utterances. In addition, while most teachers held negative attitudes towards the approach, some of them held positive attitudes towards CLT. These attitudes had implications on the aspects and quality of CLT which teachers used. Those who held negative attitudes claimed that CLT was too involving and that it was not modelled on the Exam in terms of its content and general demands. In practice, it was clear how teachers contested as well as negotiated the syllabus recommendation. The challenges which teachers faced in the teaching of English using CLT included overcrowding in classes which made it difficult for teachers to use communicative activities, as well as lack of teaching materials which made the lessons less multimodal. Others claimed that they were not adequately trained in CLT, thereby lacking capacity to apply the method. Arising from the findings, the study recommended that there was need for Continuous Professional Development (CPD) among serving teachers to acquaint them with the classroom demands of the Communicative approach to language teaching.