Detecting the Alignment of Sunrise Objectives and Classroom Instructions through Communicative Orientation of Language Teaching (COLT)

Abstract

Having the ability to communicate in the English language has become a core almost in every job requirement, and as an understanding of this fact, the Ministry of Education has changed the English language curriculum and the method of teaching of English language to communicative language teaching which proved to enhance the communicative competence of students. Studies on observing to what degree the principles of CLT are followed in actual classroom instruction suffer scarcity. This paper’s aim is to detect through Communicative orientation of language teaching scheme checklist (henceforth COLT) how the actual teaching is taking place endeavoring to diagnose the cause of the mismatched result of applying the method of communicative language teaching with students’ English proficiency in the Kurdistan Region. Two public schools in each city, Erbil, Duhok, and Sulaymani, were randomly selected to observe classroom instruction of six teachers of 11 and 12 grades. The results revealed that there are several violations to the communicative language teaching principles such as absence of pair or group work, lack of authentic materials, focus on grammatical competence instead of communicative competence, and finally, minimization of the use of the target language. Therefore, the paper suggests that familiarizing the English teachers with the sections of the COLT scheme checklist is necessary so that they align their instructions with the communicative language teaching principles and observe the objectives of Sunrise curriculum.