ABSTRACT
The study investigated teachers' beliefs and practices of communicative language teaching (principles) in senior secondary schools. One hundred and ninety-two (192) senior secondary school English language teachers sampled from four local government area of Akwa Ibom North-West Senatorial Districts, Akwa Ibom State took part in the survey.
The study adopted a descriptive survey design. Two research instruments were used: a questionnaire that was developed with twenty-two items to investigate teachers' beliefs about the six major tenets of CLT principles and an observation schedule with nineteen items which allowed the researcher to observe teachers' and compared with their actual beliefs. The reliability of the instrument was estimated using Cronbach alpha statistics and a reliability coefficient of 0.741 was obtained. Data analysis was done with percentage, mean, standard deviations, independent sample t-test and analysis of variance (ANOVA) statistics.
The findings indicated that communicative classrooms are uncommon with most teachers declaring usage of the communicative approach, but following the traditional approaches to language teaching. The findings also revealed that teachers rated themselves as favourable under the CLT principles of ‘Teachers role’, and ‘group/pair work’, would in the observation, these principles were rated rather favourable. In the same vein, under the CLT principles of ' learners' role' and 'error correction and evaluation ', teachers rated themselves as rather favourable while in their actual practice it was rated as unfavourable. Therefore, this shows that there is a mismatch between their beliefs and what they practice. There is no significant gender difference in teachers, beliefs about CLT principles. There is a significant difference in teacher's beliefs about CLT principles based on years of teaching experience. Based on this, it was recommended among others, that curriculum developers should strive to build CLT practice into the learning and teaching of English language and teachers should learn to adapt CLT approach.
