An Investigation of the Efficiency of In-service Programs on Iranian EFL Teachers‟ CLT Perception

In recent years Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) has gained a lot of interest by many EFL syllabus designers, teacher trainers and teachers. As a result of a paradigm shift in Iranian ELT from that ofGTM to CLT, the necessity of teachers‟ professional development programs which aims at shifting teachers‟attitudes thereupon their teaching practice is undeniable. Moreover, as it is agreed on by most scholars, among the influential elements in every educational pedagogy are the teachers and their perceptions and attitudes in receiving, accepting and adapting new ideas and paradigm shifts.The review of the related literature suggests that one of the fundamental reasons of failure in putting principles of any curriculum innovation into practice lies on failing to make positive influence and improvement on teachers‟ attitudes. This study is one of sate of the art in this respect since unlike the existing research in theliterature which are limited just to some private language schools, it inspected a national official languagesyllabus. It examined the efficiency of teacher training in-service programs on Vision teachers‟ attitude (the IRI s new English language textbooks). To achieve this goal, a mixed method design was employed. In the quantitative phase of the study, 92 high school English teachers were asked to respond to anadapted version of CLT attitude questionnaire developed by Karavas-Doukus [1]. In the qualitative phase of the study, six teachers, three male and three female took part in semi-structured interviews concerning their beliefs about CLT and their perceptions of barriers in implementing CLT. The results of this study revealed the fact that Iranian teachers‟ positive attitude toward the principles of CLT is highly influenced by their professionaldevelopment and could be heightened by their participation in teacher training in-service programs.Keywords: Communicative Language Teaching, professional development, mixed method design