The application of communicative language teaching approach within english as foreign language context: Saudi Arabia private education case study

This thesis documents an investigation of communicative language teaching (CLT) in student English language learning in Saudi Arabia. The adoption of CLT requires adjustment of teaching materials, assessments, and other components of English programs. CLT also requires a change in the learning paradigm, as teachers, supervisors, administrators, and curriculum designers direct their interest to the value of communicative learning approaches in developing language competence. There has been international research into teacher behavior regarding CLT but not into teacher and student attitudes concerning its use. This forms the gap in the existing literature that this investigation seeks to fill. CLT had been mandated in Saudi Arabia for over a decade at the time of this research. This investigation involved 149 students and 15 teachers from 5 private intermediate, schools in Riyadh. The thesis documents a mixed method investigation, the core of which was a quasi-experimental design where the experimental group experienced the CLT approach and the control group was taught by the conventional methods prevailing in the participating schools. Simultaneous teacher and student surveys enriched analysis of pre- and post-test results and subsequent teacher interviews further enlightened this data. The results of this investigation revealed clear superiority of CLT but negative attitudes towards it on the part of both teachers and students. These negative attitudes may be due to mismatch between mandated CLT and centrally produced external tests of student English language proficiency