Investigating the Issues and Challenges of Implementing the English Language Teaching Curriculum in Rural Schools of Hormozgan Province and Providing Solutions to Improve the Quality of the Educational Process: A Phenomenological Approach

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Associate Professor, Department of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL), Faculty of Humanities, University of Hormozgan, Bandar Abbas, Iran

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the issues and challenges of implementing English language teaching curriculum in the rural schools of Hormozgan province and to provide solutions to improve the quality of this process. For this purpose, Kaplan and Baldauf's (1997, 2003) foreign language education policy framework, which includes seven policies: access, human resources, curriculum, materials and methods, society, budget and evaluation, was used. To conduct the study, the phenomenological approach, which examines the lived experience of the participants to determine and explain the themes, had been applied. The participants were eight language teachers with teaching experience in rural areas and two ELT university instructors who were purposefully selected because of their experience in conducting research studies on curriculum planning. Data were obtained through open-ended questionnaires and semi-structured interviews and were analyzed using the stages of hermeneutic phenomenology cycle and content analysis technique. The findings of the research showed that the implementation of the ELT curriculum in public schools, in general, and rural schools, in particular, has faced critical challenges which have rendered the program somewhat fruitless ; therefore, some practical solutions were suggested to improve the quality of ELT teaching and learning process in these areas.

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