Secondary School Teachers’ Attitudes Towards Communicative Language Teaching: A report from a KAKEN questionnaire survey

Abstract

This article is based on a questionnaire survey I conducted in March 2015.The survey is part of my KAKENHI (grant-in-aid research) study, whose aim is to investigate the role of classroom discourse between teacher and students at secondary schools in Japan. The incentive for the study originated from the fact that most secondary school English classes are not conducted communicatively. The dominant teaching methodology is the Grammar Translation Method (GTM), which is not suitable to develop learners’ fluency of English. The latest revision of the guidelines by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) proposed that English classes should be conducted in English at senior high schools. This survey investigated secondary school teachers’ attitudes towards Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). The results revealed that practitioners face some common problems when conducting communicative lessons, which, as I shall argue, is the result of insufficient CLT training in pre-service programmes at university.