VietTESOL International Convention 2026

The project to make English a second language in Vietnamese schools creates an urgent need to innovate teaching methods toward developing communicative competence, enhancing the application of technology, personalizing learning, and creating an environment for using the foreign language both inside and outside the classroom. However, students’ speaking performance in high school is still poor. They have a little opportunities to be exposed to the language outside of their class, leading to slower communication skills. Therefore, the study was conducted to find out the problems that hinder the teachers’ from implementing Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in English Second Language (ESL) contexts. This research followed a mixed-method approach. Questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were employed to collect data from eight-four high school teachers. Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics while the data from the qualiative were coded and analyzed in themes. The findings of the research indicate that the key barriers hinder teachers’ from using CLT in ESL contexts were lack of authentic materials, classroom size, centralized grammar – based and inadequate training in CLT. Future implementations on Communicative Language Teaching are thus recommended for educators.