English-teachers’ Teaching Perspectives and Their Use of Methods to Foster Students’ Communicative Competence: A Comparison Between Chile and Germany

Abstract

The impact of teachers’ understanding of efficient teaching has become an important field of research in various countries and domains over the last decade. However, there have been few cross-cultural comparisons in the context of English language teaching. Additionally, the question how teachers may foster the development of communicative competence is also still in debate. In order to provide more insight in the characteristic teaching perspectives of teachers and to identify where they differ in their use of methods for ELT, this paper reports results of a cross-cultural questionnaire study with 68 EFL-teachers from Chile and Germany. The findings show interesting differences in the predominance of specific teaching perspectives. Furthermore, differences in the use of foreign language teaching methods such as interlingual communication tasks and text work were found between Chilean and German EFL-teachers. The results of the study are discussed and conclusions for teacher training and future research are drawn.

Keywords

• teaching perspectives, communicative competence, English language teaching (ELT), English as a foreign language (EFL)