المستخلص: |
The adoption of CLT into EFL teaching in many Asian countries including Saudi Arabia has provoked a great deal of comment and debate. The present study is an attempt to participate in this heated debate on the use of the communicative approach in EFL classes. It investigates the views of fifty two English-major students regarding the communicative and non- communicative activities in the EFL classroom. Furthermore, the study sets out to identify the students’ perceived difficulties in an EFL classroom where communicative activities are used. Using multi-method, data were collected by means of a questionnaire and semi-structured interview. Quantitative data were supported by the qualitative data to provide more reliable results. The results suggest that, countries like Saudi Arabia need to modernize and update their EFL teaching methods, which means making changes that will take students’ previous educational habits into consideration. It is obvious, from the study, that students in non-English speaking countries make better use of communicative language teaching (CLT) if communicative activities and non-communicative activities are combined in English classrooms. In other words, aligning the communicative approach with traditional teaching of structures is beneficial for EFL students. Moreover, the findings indicate that insufficient authentic material uses, large classroom sizes and grammar-based national syllabuses prevent the effective implementation of CLT activities in classrooms. Therefore, it is hoped that this study will focus on the learners’ views and needs so as to improve the curriculum
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