Back to the Classroom: Lessons learnt by a teacher educator

Abstract

This self-study focuses on the suitability of implementing the Communicative Language Teaching approach to teach English in contexts where the conditions for learning might be different to those implied by the original tenets of the approach. As a university-based teacher educator, the researcher promotes this approach in her methodology classes. She returned to classroom teaching to better understand the challenges faced by student teachers in implementing Communicative Language Teaching and to re-visit several assumptions of her understanding of the teaching and learning process.

Keywords:

• English language teaching
• communicative language teaching
• teacher educator
• return to classroom
• theory and practice

Acknowledgement

My thanks go to the school management and the teaching staff that hosted me during this self-study. Without their belief in what I was doing, my return to the classroom would not have been possible.