Appropriateness and relevancy of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) for Bangladesh: A perspective from Bangladeshi rural secondary school English teachers

The rise of English as a global language in recent years has led to its worldwide consumption. Recognizing its popularity, the government of Bangladesh has identified English as an important tool to compete in the global market. While English is now a compulsory subject in the primary and secondary levels of education, a vast majority of learners leave schools, especially in the rural communities, with only rudimentary knowledge of English. Concerned with the continuing deterioration of the standard of English, the National Curriculum and Textbook Board (NCTB) revised the English curriculum for secondary schools (grades 6 to 10) in the 1990s. This top-down revision necessitated a switch from the traditional method, i.e., the grammar-translation method, to the more recently developed Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach. However, the impact of this curricular change on rural secondary school teachers has been under-researched. In response, the current study investigates rural teachers' perspectives on the CLT based curriculum through in-depth individual and group interviews and classroom observations. The findings indicate (a) mismatches between the NCTB's learning goals and classroom expectations on the one hand, and language teachers' learning objectives and the reality of the rural Bangladesh classroom setting on the other (b) a narrowing of the content of the English curriculum in order to teach to a test - the Secondary School Certificate examination and finally (c) a difference in interpretation of CLT at the core-English-speaking communities and at the rural secondary schools in Bangladesh. Insights gleaned from the study are valuable in addressing the implementation issues surrounding the prescribed curriculum.