Speaker
Description
Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is one of the most researched, advocated as well as debated teaching approaches in English Language Teaching (ELT), given its potentials for developing learners’ communicative competence in an increasingly globalized world as well as the complexity, blurredness, and wide range of CLT’s conceptual constructs and practices (Mangubhai et al., 2007). Though many previous studies have discussed sociocultural mismatches when CLT is applied to Asian contexts, there has been a lack of studies exploring how CLT is employed and adapted to suit different local contexts. In one of such attempts, this study aims to investigate teachers’ perceptions and practices towards Communicative Language Teaching in a Vietnamese university. Following post-structural perspectives of language, culture, identity, this study is designed as a case study, using classroom observations and semi-structured interviews as main data collection methods, and Conversation Analysis and thematic analysis as data analysis methods. Findings from the study help to unpack the teachers’ attitudes towards CLT and how they conduct their teaching approaches in relation to CLT. The study also explores the theoretical power of post-structural perspectives of language, culture, and identity in explaining these perceptions and practices, so that implications for a more in-depth and comprehensive conceptual framework of CLT can be further explored in future research.
