This study is to investigate whether EFL teachers at HCMC Nong Lam University (NLU) fulfill the four major roles in a Communicative Language Teaching classroom or not and which may prevent the teachers accomplishing these roles by interviewing 10 EFL teachers and conducting a survey on 324 students of those teachers’ classes. After the data were quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed, the research findings revealed that although the teachers completed the roles of participants and group process managers, the role of need analysts and facilitators were somewhat ignored due to the three major hindrances: the students’ low level of English, large class size and multilevel classes. Based on these findings, some subsequently recommendations were suggested with the hope to partially solve these above problems at NLU as well as other universities in similar contexts.DOI: 10.18173/2354-1075.2019-0129