Abstract:
In order to expand the literature on the concept of teacher success and buttress the previous findings in this regard, this study attempted to explore characteristics of successful EFL teachers from EFL learners' and teachers' perspectives. Thirty Iranian undergraduate EFL learners and 30 EFL teachers were interviewed and also responded to the Successful EFL Teachers Questionnaire. The content analysis of the interview data showed a number of themes emphasized mutually by the two groups; among them being knowledgeable followed by being competent at teaching and conveying knowledge were the most frequent themes. Further interview findings uncovered some themes stated exclusively by learners and some others exclusively by teachers. The descriptive statistics also revealed that the 12 subscales of the questionnaire were ranked mostly in the same order of importance by both groups, and the Mann-Whitney U test outcomes evinced significant differences regarding the perspectives of the learners and teachers only for four subscales of the questionnaire. All in all, based on the results, it was concluded that, compared to the teachers, the learners held a more restricted conceptualization of the qualities of successful EFL teachers. Accordingly, pedagogical implications were suggested in the English language teaching and learning context of Iran.
Machine summary:
g. , Olson, 2015; Stobaugh, Mittelberg, & Huang, 2020).
In this respect, Borg (2006) maintained that successful foreign language teachers have 11 distinctive characteristics with regard to the nature of the subject, the content of teaching, methodology, teacher-learner relationships, non-native issues, teachers’ characteristics, training, status, errors, student body, and commercialization.
In the ELT context of Iran, Shishavan and Sadeghi (2009) sought to identify the qualities of successful English language teachers from 215 learners' and 59 teachers' points of view through employing both quantitative and qualitative means of inquiry.
All in all, in order to buttress the findings of previous research, help to reach more conclusive and generalizable findings, and understand points of convergence and departure between the perspectives of teachers and students on the issue, the present study attempted to explore qualities of successful EFL teachers from the perspectives of both language teachers and students within the educational context of Iran.
4. Results As stated before, the study sought to explore English language learners' and teachers' perspectives towards the characteristics of successful EFL teachers.
The Most Frequently Mentioned Characteristics of Successful EFL Teachers by Both Learners and Teachers in Interview (View the image of this page) Characteristics Among the list indicated in Table 2, being knowledgeable regarding content and the English language was the most frequently found attribute mentioned by 55% of the respondents in the two groups.