objective of this research is to identify some of the obstacles that face secondary school teachers of the Arabic language courses in using modern teaching methods in class.

The research focuses on secondary school teachers of the Arabic language courses at the central region of Nineveh Governorate for the school year (2008-2009). 30 teachers out of 792, were randomly chosen to apply the research tool upon.

To fulfill the objective of this research, the researcher first surveyed a number of teachers , he then identified four categories of obstacles; obstacles related to school administrative system and environment, the teacher, courses and pupils, and the nature of teaching methods.

The researcher constructed the research tool based on (Leekart), the tool was then presented to a number of professionals for validation. To measure the stability of the tool, it was first applied to an investigational sample of 10 teachers with a 25-day intervals, and after comparing results, (Pearson) was calculated with a result of 0.82, which proves the stability of the tool used.

After applying the tool to the research subjects and calculating the results, the researcher concluded the following:

School administrative and environmental related obstacles were the main cause of secondary school teachers abandoning modern teaching methods in Arabic language classes, then comes teacher related obstacles, followed by courses and pupils related obstacles, and finally, obstacles related to the nature of modern teaching methods.