University EFL learners’ perceptions of communicative language teaching and learning

Abstract

This paper attempts to explore Slovak EFL learners’ perceptions of the fundamental principles of communicative approach, which has been employed as the primary way of teaching foreign languages for the past five decades. Research participants were formed by 111 Slovak university EFL leaners – teacher trainees (n = 111), who were asked to demonstrate their level of agreement to the statements concerning communicative language teaching by responding to a 5-point Likert scale questionnaire. The calculated means indicate that overall, the research participants are in agreement with the selected principles of CLT as they agreed with 16 out of the 18 chosen statements. However, they appear to be neutral about two aspects of CLT, the use of native language at EFL lessons and discovering and investigating grammatical rules by learners themselves. Arising out of the research results, the conclusions are drawn, and pedagogical implications are discussed.

Keywords

• clt
• communicative language teaching
• communicative approach
• l1
• l2
• efl learner