Teaching Speaking Skills at the Secondary Level: Challenges and Classroom Practices in Rural Nepal

Abstract

This qualitative descriptive study examines the challenges secondary level English teachers face in teaching speaking skills, and the classroom practices they use in response, in Tribeni Rural Municipality, Rukum West, Nepal. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with five secondary-level English teachers from community schools, conducted in Nepali by telephone/internet and audio-recorded with participants’ consent, and supplemented by interviewer field notes. Three themes were developed. Classroom-level challenges included large class sizes, limited exposure to English outside the classroom, examination-oriented instruction, students’ fear of making mistakes, and inadequate instructional resources. Teacher- and institutional-level challenges included administrative workload that reduced lesson-planning time, teachers’ own uncertainty about their spoken English, tension between curricular expectations for communicative competence and classroom realities, limited access to professional development, and limited collaboration among teachers. Despite these constraints, participants described adapting their practice through pair work, group discussion, questioning, role-play and other communicative tasks, and supportive feedback strategies broadly consistent with the principles of Communicative Language Teaching, even though full CLT implementation was constrained by the rural context. The findings suggest that classroom, teacher, and institutional constraints interact rather than operate independently, and that teachers’ adaptive strategies represent low-resource responses to a communicatively oriented curriculum operating under examination-driven, resource-scarce conditions. Because the study draws on five teachers in one rural municipality, the findings are context-specific rather than statistically generalizable; they may nonetheless inform teacher professional development, resource provision, and curriculum-assessment alignment in similarly under-resourced rural settings.