The Process of Implementing Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in Korean Secondary Classrooms

Hyun Hee Kim

Research shows that Korean EFL teachers have encountered difficulties in the process of implementing Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in their classroom practices (Li, 1998) since pedagogical change, intrinsic to implementing CLT, was introduced in EFL teaching in Korea. Realising that "the grammatical syllabus does not help much to develop learners' communicative competence" (Li, 1998), the Korean government decided to introduce CLT into English teaching at secondary school level and the Ministry of Education first issued a CLT-based curriculum in 1990s. This CLT-based curriculum was issued with prescriptions regarding the aims, principles and methods of English language teaching and learning, its contents, approaches and evaluation methods. The movement "from a knowledge-based curriculum to one centring on life situations and individual needs of learners" (Hong, 1983) continued along with government-initiated massive curriculum changes. These gave birth to the Seventh National Curriculum, which is the national guideline for English teaching at Korean middle schools from 2001 in order to introduce a more communicative approach with all four-macro skills of communication included. It highlights communicative competence as "the ability of language learners to interact with other speakers of English in real-life situation" (Development Committee, 1997). It is also a learner-centred approach, its focus being on the learning process as essential features of the language classroom. This new curriculum lays down that the objectives of learning should reflect the needs of the learner, that learning activities should involve real communication, and that learning tasks meaningful to the learner.

Such measures are evidence of an awareness at top levels of government of the importance of English education. However, Li (1998) indicates that teachers in Korean secondary education have perceived difficulties in implementing these policies for various reasons (e.g. large classes, grammar-based examinations, teacher-deficiency in spoken English, lack of training in CLT). All these constraining factors facing teachers encouraged to adopt CLT in their teaching cause CLT to remain as an ineffective approach in Korean secondary classrooms. It is inappropriate, however to speak of "constraints" existing in Korea as being responsible for perceiving CLT as ineffective, since all is considered to be surface level of barriers to implementing pedagogy-induced changes. Thus, the study will further investigate the realities of English Language Teaching in Korean secondary schools to support to move towards a CLT-oriented classroom in both teachers' perception and classroom practices. The focus is on addressing the lack of understanding of language and CLT and ill-formed classroom practices which teachers might bring to their teaching. Data will be obtained through questionnaires and interviews.