Spanish Teaching Assistants’ Attitudes towards Communicative Language Teaching
Dr. Comfort Pratt

Abstract
Among the reasons discussed in the literature for difficulties in the implementation of communicative language teaching (CLT) in second language classrooms are the attitudes of teachers towards the approach. In an effort to ascertain the nature of this problem in lower-level college programs, this study investigated the attitudes of teaching assistants of Spanish towards the approach by means of an attitude scale. The results revealed that the teaching assistants held favorable attitudes towards the principles of CLT, especially with regard to the thematic groups corresponding to group/pair work and the role and contribution of learners. They also demonstrated low favorability towards error correction. Pearson product-moment correlation analyses revealed that there was no correlation between their attitudes and their native or non-native speaker status, or their years of experience, but there was a weak positive correlation between their attitudes and the amount of professional training they had received.

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