An Issue of Pedagogical Concern: Why does It Take So Long to Albanian Students to Develop English Communicative Fluency?

Despite the early launch of English language teaching, officially at the third grade of elementary public schooling in Albania upward till university studies, communicative fluency of spoken English remains a noticeable struggle to Albanian students conducting academic programs in English. This paper will examine the causal factors that negatively add to this situation arguing that it is related to the irrelevant pedagogic philosophy of English teachers. This teaching approach is mainly driven by teacher centred grammar translation method. Moreover, we argue that the most successful approach to be urgently pursued is the interactive communicative one. Once having ascertained and made the case of Albanian students finding hard to express themselves fluently and coherently in English, we emphasize and propose ways of utilizing interactive communicative approach in English language academic courses demonstrating that this is the sole approach to prioritize and fulfil effectively the students' linguistic needs and English communicative potentials. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.