Defeng Li

Potential and Problems of Communicative Language Teaching in China: Absolutely Not the Same Defeng Li

This book explores Chinese EFL teachers' understanding of English teaching, particularly the difficulties they encountered in their attempts to adopt Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in the Chinese context. It is found that while cognizant of their achievements, they generally found problems in English teaching in China, and reportedly had a range of difficulties in implementing CLT in their classrooms. Although interested in change and eager to identify with CLT, they were not optimistic about overcoming the difficulties and thus felt there would be only limited use of CLT in their teaching. It was argued that these difficulties were largely due to the fact that CLT, as a methodology developed in the West, was laden with Western cultural values, which were very different from dominant Chinese cultural values. In order to facilitate the incorporation of a communicative component into traditional teaching methods, changes must be made in teachers' understanding of language learning, teaching and curricula in teacher education programs, and a theoretical framework worked out to guide the process of introducing teaching methods into different contexts.