A Comparative Study of Novice and Experienced Iranian EFL Teachers with Respect to Classroom Interactional Competence and Development of Communicative Language Teaching

Communicative language teaching (CLT), as an approach of English language teaching (ELT), has been evidenced to provide opportunities for learners’ participation through putting interaction at the center of language teaching and learning. However, few studies to date have investigated how EFL teachers’ capability in applying CLT can be developed in the classroom contexts. To fill up this gap, a teacher education program (TEP), based on the strategies of classroom interactional competence (CIC), was implemented with two experienced and two novice EFL teachers serving as participants. To do this, initially sixteen hours of video- and audio-recorded data of the participants were analyzed to identify the samples in which they neglected the opportunity for CLT. Then, instructional sessions according to CIC strategies were dialogically held by the teacher educator with each of the teachers, during which the teacher educator attempted to expand teachers’ insight into the strategies they adopted to apply CLT. After instructional sessions, the analysis of the recorded data demonstrated novice and experienced EFL teachers’ noticeable progress in CLT implementation at different levels. Moreover, the findings indicated that EFL teachers applied a variety of CIC strategies in the classroom contexts.