ABSTRACT

Since the late 1990s, communicative language teaching (CLT) has been the buzz word on everyone’s lips in the Korean English education community. Unsatisfied with traditional English teaching approaches and needing to meet the increasing demand for competent English users, the Korean Ministry of Education introduced the Communicative Language Teaching Policy (CLT) as the core of the secondary school English curriculum. To implement CLT more effectively, the government also announced the Teaching English Through English (TEE) policy (Lee, 2001). Compared to previous secondary school English curricula based on either grammar-translation or the audio-lingual method, the introduction of CLT and TEE posed significant challenges for English teachers in South Korea (Choi, 2000; Li, 1998).