The Perspectives of Students in the College of Basic Education on the Characteristics of Effective English Language Teachers

Abstract

This paper presents a research study designed to investigate the characteristics of effective teachers of English and the uniqueness of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The research is based on four general categories: English language proficiency, educational perception, organization and communication skills, social and emotional skills. These general categories will be viewed in the light of students' perception, the students of English Language at the Faculty of Basic Education in the State Kuwait. The sample was chosen randomly from students of the English Department to measure independent variables Academy in correlation with academic variables. For example, English language courses taken, years of schooling, and levels of English proficiency. The researchers based their research on data collected through a questionnaire based on Lickert's five-point rating distributed to 150 students. It is expected that the results reveal students' belief in the importance of the categories listed above with emphasis on the uniqueness of EFL teachers in comparison with teachers of other disciplines. This study contributes to the understanding of what students expect from EFL teachers; in addition, it will enable the understating of what students believe is required from them as teachers of English in the future. It is expected that this study will contribute to the field of EFL in the College of Basic Education and the Department of Education in Kuwait University, as it would reflect what the English Departments in these colleges need in order to increase students' awareness of the importance and role of EFL teachers.

Characteristics of An Effective EFL Teacher in Indonesia: Expectations and Realities in A Technology-Enhanced Flipped Classroom

“…Regarding the first research question, the findings reveal that teachers' patience, friendliness, and niceness are believed to be the most contributing attitudes to make the learning process effective. The findings resonate with previous research in other countries such as Cyprus (Kourieos & Evripidou, 2013), Korea (Barnes, 2010), and Kuwait (Taqi, et al, 2014). It is not surprising then that loving to give more assignments and strictness are the least preferred attitudes among the students.…”

“…Being friendly, confident, and open-minded as the ideal attitudes resonated with Kourieos and Evripidou (2013) from the perspectives of 110 first-year undergraduate EFL students from two private universities in Cyprus. Taqi, Al-Nouh, and Akbar (2014) revealed contrasting evidence between the low achieving and high achieving students with the total number of students participating in the study as many as 150 undergraduate ELT students in Kuwait. While the former group preferred teachers' having a good sense of humor, the latter group was concerned with teachers' being helpful to students.…”

Effective Foreign Language Teaching: Perceptions of Prospective English Language Teachers

“…One of the most important components of education; that is foreign language teaching, is not an exception for defining effectiveness. There have been scholarly debates about effective foreign language teaching and there exist several studies [1,2,11,12,17,18,35] about the qualities of effective foreign language teachers and their practices. Bell [7] defines effective foreign language teaching as "clear and enthusiastic teaching that provides learners with the grammatical (syntactical and morphological), lexical, phonological, pragmatic, and sociocultural knowledge and interactive practice they need to communicate successfully in the target language" (p. 260).…”