An investigation of teachers' perceptions of the English language curriculum in Kuwaiti elementary schools

This study examines the perceptions of Kuwaiti elementary school English language teachers, and their supervisors regarding the teachers' effectiveness in teaching English to first and second graders. The study also investigates the teachers' and supervisors' opinions of the textbook and curriculum supplied by Kuwaiti Ministry of Education, and the teachers' opinions of the training they received in the new Kuwait College of Basic Education (CBE) elementary English language teaching program, or in other teacher training programs. Participants were six first or second grade English teachers in three schools in three school districts, chosen for their varying socioeconomic and cultural diversity among the six school districts in Kuwait. In each school, one new graduate of the CBE program was matched with a more experienced teacher. Data included formal interviews guided by questionnaires, informal interviews, observations and tape-recordings of two two-week sets of classes taught by each teacher, and documents such as the teachers' manual, handouts, evaluations, etc.; The main findings of the study were first, that the Kuwaiti English language teachers strongly approved of communicative language teaching, but their actual classroom teaching was highly teacher-centered, consisting mainly of parroting drills. They were extremely reluctant to depart from the set lesson plans supplied in the teachers' manual by the Ministry of Education. Second, the teachers, and the supervisors, would have liked to expand the official curriculum, which focused on speaking and listening, to include more translation into Arabic, and earlier introduction of reading, writing, and simple grammar. Third, the teachers and the researcher were not satisfied with the teachers' current level of proficiency in English language. Fourth, the teachers were highly critical of their college EFL training, which often failed to relate theory to actual classroom practice, and did not provide enough practice teaching. At the end of the study, recommendations are offered to teachers, school authorities, the Ministry of Education, and the College of Basic Education.