A Study Of The Difficulties Of Adopting CLT In Xiantao's Senior Middle Schools

In the past three decades, since the communicative language teaching (CLT) was introduced into class, studies on CLT have become a popular topic in this field. How to adopt CLT successfully in China has aroused many linguists' interests. In recent years, as the study on CLT has been furthered, the difficulties in adopting CLT in Chinese context have become another hot topic in the field of foreign language teaching.My present research chooses the difficulties of adopting CLT in senior middle schools in Xiantao in Hubei province as the research topic and conducts an empirical study on it. The present research attempts to bridge the gap in the previous study which is too general by finding out the difficulties of adopting CLT in senior middle schools in Xiaotao in the hope that it may give some implications both for the language teachers and learners in Xiantao.In this research, the English teachers in senior middle school in Xiantao are selected randomly as the participants. The data is collected by a piece of questionnaire and interviews. The main body of the questionnaire consists of the difficulties that the English teachers have encountered or might encounter in applying CLT in senior middle schools in Xiantao. The difficulties are closely related to the four elements on teaching: teacher, students, educational system and CLT itself.Interviews are the complement of the questionnaires. It attempts to find out why CLT has been difficult to implement and how to make CLT effective in Xiantao. 116 participants from nine senior middle schools finish the questionnaires within the given time. And the interviews have been done with nine informants from nine different schools.By analyzing the data, it is found that the difficulties in adopting CLT are mainly caused by the teacher, the students, the students' parents, educational systems and the CLT itself.Based on the above findings, it is suggested in order to adopt CLT successfully in Xiantao, we should change the fundamental approach to education, modify the way of teaching English, develop local economy and invest more money in education, and innovate the National University Entrance Examination.