Will communicative language teaching work? Teachers' perceptions toward the new educational reform in South Korea

Abstract

This study examines how Korean elementary and secondary school teachers perceive the seventh national curriculum focusing on communicative language teaching. Thirty-seven participants were surveyed with a questionnaire designed grounded in Li (1998) and interviewed individually for about 15-20 minutes. The collected data was analyzed based upon Stake's (2000) theme-based approach. The results showed that teachers' perception onto CLT was very limited to speaking skills. The main issue concerning the teachers coming from different school levels was varied. Elementary school teachers were more concerned about enhancing students' involvement, whereas secondary school teachers pointed out the difficulty of implementing CLT due to the heavy focus on the paper-and-pencil format of college entrance exam. In addition, novice teachers were more skeptical than experienced ones in terms of the feasibility of CLT in the actual classroom context, even though they were thought to be more familiar to the concept of CLT. This study is expected to provide us with an opportunity to revisit a decade-old concept of CLT in Korean context in more critical way.