Are our High School Classes Taught and Rested Based on CLT?

The communicative approach to EFL teaching has been viewed favourably in Iranian public school in recent years. In a late but clear paradigm shift from traditional grammar-based coursebooks, the Iranian Ministry of Education (ME) has recently developed coursebook materials based on Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and a great deal of time and energy has been spent by teachers on integrating and adapting the high-school coursebook with this approach with an objective to aid the learners’ communicative competence. However, few studies have probed how this high-stake integration is faring so far from the perspective of main implementers. In the present study, 120 teachers randomly chosen from a wide range of perspectives were asked to state their ideas about Coursebooks named Prospect and Vision, via a purpose-built questionnaire. To triangulate the results, 3 expert teachers who are the head of English department in 3 different townships were further interviewed to investigate the coursebook approach toward learners’ assessment based on CLT in relation to the current practices in assessment at schools. The year-final tests of English Reading and Writing administered in 20 provinces in grade 9 were also analysed as well using a checklist by two raters and inter-rater reliability was estimated. These tests had been developed based on the coursebook, by the ME and all the students were evaluated based on them. The findings show that the high school coursebooks approach is far from clear to the teachers involved, and more acutely for the teachers of coursebook named Vision. The coursebook developers have not provided sufficiently appropriate resources and training for the teachers and thus the teachers are not clear or have conflicting views about assessing the students’ achievement. The results also indicate that each individual teacher has his/her own method of evaluating their own students, independent of the coursebook approach and thus considerable number of the tests are not in line with CLT at all, which is a content validity threat. It was also found that there is little consistency between the test content and formats which are provided by the ME in different provinces.