Characteristics of EFL teachers leading to positive language learning behaviors in students

Abstract

Taking into consideration the role of teachers’ leader characteristics in enhancing quality in education, this study aimed to identify what students think the most important characteristics of teachers who enable them to develop positive language learning behaviors are. Finding out whether these traits fall into a particular category or not was also aimed. Due to the lack of a questionnaire directly serving this purpose, a questionnaire including some characteristics of leader teachers helping students develop positive language learning behaviors was constructed for this study. In determining the items in the questionnaire, a group of students’ responses to an open-ended question and the review of the related literature were used as the main sources. This questionnaire aimed to find out the most significant category of teacher traits in students’ opinion and the reasons why they thought the statements they chose were more important than the others in a particular item. This questionnaire was administered at the end of 2008-2009 spring semester to 303 students in 11 different classrooms at Anadolu University School of Foreign Languages. Each item in the questionnaire included statements belonging to the categories of ‘personal characteristics’, ‘physical characteristics’, ‘pedagogical knowledge’ and ‘field knowledge’. Each item also included a sentence beginning with ‘BECAUSE’ and the participants were expected to complete these sentences to justify their choices. The data were analyzed by calculating the frequencies and percentages of the respondents’ choices. Besides, students’ explanations concerning why they chose a particular statement as more important than the other statements in a particular item were divided into idea units and they were analyzed and evaluated according to their frequency. The analysis of the data gathered indicated that ‘personal characteristics’ of teachers enabling their students to develop positive language learning behaviors were chosen as the most important group of teacher traits by the majority of students. The statements related to their ‘pedagogical knowledge’, ‘field knowledge’ and ‘physical characteristics’ respectively follow the ones concerning ‘personal characteristics’ in order of importance. Additionally, in the part in which students are expected to provide explanations regarding their choices, the main points students mostly focused on were the significance of the role of teachers in enhancing studentmotivation, characteristics of the learning environment which enable them to feel comfortable, some basic issues learners have to deal with during the learning process, the quality of the input they are exposed to and the importance of the quality of student-teacher relationships. After these main points were discussed one by one, some implications were also made in the light of these results.