Characteristics of English Teachers in ELT

The purposes of this study were to delineate the characteristics of effective English teachers (EET) in terms of subject matter knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and socio affective skills, to compare the characteristics of EET perceived by different parties of teachers and students, and to stimulate further discussion of the topic both in and outside of Bangladesh.  In sum, the studies on effective teaching summarized above revealed that some of the characteristics of effective teachers were universal, that other characteristics were group dependent, and that numerous effective characteristics could be classified into a few categories including subject matter knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and socio-affective skills, with different endorsement rates according to groups such as teachers and students, male and female students, and high achieving and low achieving students. The characteristics of a good teacher of English include many traits and strategies. English teachers need to do their best in implementing techniques in the classroom to help our nation’s children reach their learning potential.

Instructional Techniques

English teachers need to teach reading, writing, viewing, listening, and speaking. These are five distinct areas, and each has its own set of benchmarks and indicators. Simply put, English teachers have a great deal of content to juggle in the classroom. The list of indicators for their content is quite long. They need to be knowledgeable of grammar, vocabulary, writing, literary elements, great novels, researching techniques, speech strategies, etc. In addition to being a master of content, teachers need to have a large repertoire of teaching strategies. Direct instruction, collaborative learning, and the jigsaw strategy, are just a few techniques that effective teachers use in the classroom. Variety is the key. So, the English teacher must be flexible and willing to try a variety of strategies to see what works best with his or her students.

Management Techniques

Good English teachers must have excellent classroom management techniques. If teachers cannot manage their students successfully, very little learning will occur in the classroom. With the No Child Left behind Act and current state policy, it is important that students make gains in their learning every year. For young teachers, classroom management is usually a struggle. New teachers need to be willing to seek out seasoned teachers to mentor them on how to handle the classroom properly and to try different classroom management strategies.

Personality Traits

Usually, the three most important personality traits are a flexible approach, a caring attitude, and a sense of humor. There are, of course, other personality traits that enable teachers to become great teachers. However, in the current torrent of change in education, a teacher needs to be flexible to help a student. It also helps to be able to laugh and to keep smiling in this climate of change. It is very important that students feel that their teachers care about them. They need to feel safe in a supportive learning environment because this may be the only safe place that some children have. A safe, caring learning environment will help students to work to their true potential. Last, teachers need to have a sense of humor. So many things go wrong every day. It is important to be able to laugh and to keep going. The students need a happy teacher, not an angry one.

Teachers in general education

Compared with many studies done on the characteristics of effective teachers in general education, there is a dearth of studies on the characteristics of ELT. This is deplorable because foreign language education lags far behind general education in effective teacher and teacher education, and because foreign language education, to date, has been undertaken with more intuitive than scientific approaches. Brosh identified the characteristics of ELT as perceived by high school teachers and students in Israel with interviews and a questionnaire consisting of 20 items of teacher characteristics. Both groups attributed the highest importance to items regarding commanding the target language and teaching comprehensibly, whereas neither the teachers nor the students endorsed items regarding positive attitudes toward native speakers and teaching in the target language.

Create a classroom environment

To identify the characteristics of a good language teacher, studied good language learner behaviors in the hope that knowledge of good language learner traits can help the good language teacher create a classroom environment that will facilitate second language learning. They outlined the traits of good language teachers as follows: Professional training such as professional meetings and instructional techniques; language proficiency such as four skills and cultural comprehension; instructional materials such as visual and audio materials; evaluation such as assessment of students and professional testing; and classroom environment such as reduction of second language anxiety and maintenance of classroom discipline.

Development of the Questionnaire

The characteristics of effective teachers as perceived by high school English teachers and students in Bangladesh were measured by a questionnaire developed by the authors. For the sake of reliability and validity, the development of the questionnaire underwent the following three stages as per the recommendation of Devellis: generating an item pool under three categories, reviewing the items by experts, and selecting the final items. In the first stage, the authors generated a total of many items contributing to effective English teachers based on previous studies and teaching experiences.  In the second stage, the draft of the questionnaire was reviewed by eight experts including three high school teachers and five professors specialized in TESL in the following order.  In the third stage, several items were added and dropped as per the recommendation of the experts, producing a total of many items for the pilot study.

English teacher’s background

In addition to the questionnaire about effective English teachers, the authors also used background questionnaires about teachers and students in order to gather demographic information about them. The background questionnaire about the teachers included such items as age, gender, degree and major, teaching hours, class size, and study experiences abroad. The background questionnaire about the students included such questions as age, gender, and class hours learning English in and outside school.

Relation between Students and Teachers

The finding that teachers and students held different beliefs about effective teaching is supported by previous studies. The teachers’ higher endorsement of English proficiency over pedagogical knowledge might be due to their beliefs that good English proficiency made it possible to conduct their lessons confidently without inhibitions and insecurity. The students’ high attachment to pedagogical knowledge might be because they wanted their teachers to transmit their subject matter knowledge effectively, as was found elsewhere. Another reason for the students’ low attachment to English proficiency might be that the students took teachers’ high level of English proficiency for granted. Interestingly, the teachers and the students in this study gave the lowest weight to socio-affective skills, disputing previous studies in general teacher education that these skills were considered more important than subject matter knowledge and teaching methodology.

English Proficiency

The mean scores for the items in English proficiency were computed to investigate the relative importance of the items perceived by each group, as seen in Table 3. In the comparison between the teachers and the students, both groups responded to reading and speaking proficiency most highly out of the eight items. This result might be due to the importance of communicative ability set by the curricular goals of high school English education in Bangladesh. The largest difference between the two groups was found in listening and grammatical proficiency where the teachers endorsed the ability to understand and the students endorsed grammatical knowledge. The teachers’ high endorsement of the ability to understand was expected because it was important to get a high score on the English part of the Bangladesh, as mentioned above. However, the students’ endorsement of grammatical proficiency was surprising because it was one of the least emphasized areas of proficiency in teaching and in the Bangladesh. The reason for this perception might be due to the students’

English learning experiences

English learning experiences and ill-founded beliefs about language learning. Overall, the effective teacher characteristics of English proficiency perceived by the teachers and the students were significantly different from each other. In the comparisons between students, both the male students and the low achieving students gave reading and grammatical proficiency the highest rankings, whereas both the female students and the high achieving students gave speaking and reading proficiency the highest rankings. The females differed largely from the males in pronunciation which was considered more important by the females, and the high achieving students differed largely from the low achieving students in speaking proficiency which was considered more important by the high achieving students.

Pedagogical Knowledge

The teachers perceived preparing the lesson well and providing interesting activities as the most important characteristics, whereas the students perceived providing interesting activities and teaching tailored to students’ proficiency levels as the most important characteristics. The importance of interesting activities perceived by both the teachers and the students confirmed previous findings in which exemplary college teachers had the ability to generate intellectual excitement in students through various ways also argued that interesting activities aroused students’ attention and motivation which, in turn, led to students’ learning. Even though the overall difference between the groups was not significant, the largest difference was found in teaching how to learn English outside the classroom for the females. It was surprising to find that this item was perceived as less important by all the groups.

Reading and speaking proficiency

There were universal teacher characteristics which were considered important by all the groups, such as reading and speaking proficiency, arousing students’ interest in learning English, and building students’ self-confidence and motivation. However, other characteristics were group-specific. Fore instance, the teachers and the students placed more weight on listening proficiency and grammatical proficiency, respectively. The male students reported having a good sense of humor as important to teaching more than the female students did, whereas the female students reported pronunciation proficiency, teaching how to learn English, and treating student’s fairly as important teacher characteristics. These findings have the following implications for knowledge-based teacher education for current and prospective English teachers in Bangladesh. First, considering the teachers’ higher endorsement of English proficiency over pedagogical knowledge and socio-affective skills, in-service and preserves teacher education programs should focus on improving teachers’ English proficiency.

Linguistics and English literature

This argument leads to another important question: Can prospective teachers reach this level with the limited class hours in school? We maintain a degree of skepticism on this point. However, we suggest that language courses including the four skills be introduced throughout the curriculum, without confining these courses to lower-division courses and those other content courses be taught in English as the vehicle of instruction. Second, the students’ higher endorsement of pedagogical knowledge over English proficiency and socio-affective skills implies that teachers should be conversant with L2 acquisition theories, teaching methods, and testing in order to help their students learn English effectively. For this, college courses for prospective teachers should be oriented more toward L2 acquisition theories, teaching methods, and testing than linguistics and English literature. The rationale for this is quite simple that the goal of the courses for prospective teachers is not to clone experts in theoretical linguistics and literary criticism, but to create experts in teaching English as a foreign language.

Explored in future research

This study is by no means comprehensive and has limitations in regard to two points. First, since the data was collected and analyzed at one point in time, the conclusions made above should be interpreted with caution. Second, while this study produced rich data about effective teaching, there is the fear that some data was neglected. These limitations lead to the following areas to be explored in future research: First, the quantitative findings of this study should be replicated by other participants across academic levels and investigated further through in-depth qualitative analysis. Second, the underlying reasons for different perceptions regarding effective English teachers held by different groups should be investigated. Third, the relationship between students’ perceptions regarding effective English teachers and their achievement needs to be further explored.

Reevaluate the importance of teaching

Considering the daunting task of learning a second language, specifically after the critical period with limited classroom hours across academic levels, both the teachers and the students should reevaluate the importance of teaching how to learn English outside the classroom. It is important to note that the low achievement students considered tailored input the most important among all the groups, suggesting that teachers pay specific attention to providing comprehensible input to these students. Overall, it is interesting to find that the high achieving students differed significantly from the low achieving students in the responses to pedagogical knowledge, with the largest gap in teaching English incorporating students’ learning styles for the low achieving students and preparing the lesson well for the high achieving students.

Socio-Affective Skills

The role of motivation has been widely recognized among teachers and researchers in that motivation turned out to be a key to L2 acquisition as well as general human learning. In a similar vein, Lowman argued that students’ learning was most influenced by the amount of academic ability students had and how motivated they were to use that ability in a given class. Several researchers saw the significance of confidence or self-efficacy in L2 acquisition, general human learning, and a model of willingness to communicate. Significant level. The largest group differences between the teachers and the students were arousing students’ motivation in favor of the teachers and listening to students’ opinions in favor of the students. The students’ endorsement of listening to students’ opinions was paralleled with the students’ emphasis on learner-centered teaching, as discussed above.

Honesty

The sign of a good leader is the honesty towards his/her work and employees. You should be very honest to your own self as well. Never loose your integrity, whatever be the circumstances, because a leader will not be considered reliable and worth following, if he/she looses honesty.     

Confidence

Confidence should exude in every word you say; in everything you do. Have the confidence to manage people and show them the right path, whenever they seek your guidance. People who see panic or uncertainty in the eyes of their leader won’t consider him/her worth depending upon, in the time of crisis.

Patience

If you want to be known as a good leader, it is very important to be patient. Be cool, calm and collected. Do not panic or loose your temper when the situation is nerve-wracking. A good leader considers crisis, emotions and tricky situations a part of his journey and never looses his composure.

Focus

To become a good leader, you should always remains steadfast to the goal, without wasting time in checking for the possibility of hindrances that might creep in. If you find any obstacles in this process, consider it as your moral responsibility to solve them and find better ways to make progress towards the target.  

Dedication

People will respond more openly to a leader who is dedicated towards his/her work and constantly works for the betterment of the employees as well as the organization. You should be zealous about your work and prove yourself as a source of inspiration for the people around you.

 Consistency

Consistency is an important leadership quality. Maintain your own way of approach and do not change it radically. Displaying inconsistency will confound others. Remember, you are a part of the team. Therefore, before expecting consistency from others, ensure that you are stable on your part.

Motivate Others

Always encourage your juniors and congratulate them for all their achievements, whether small or big. This will create a healthy environment in your workplace, which will in turn motivate your employees to give their best performance every time they are assigned a task.

Positive

The teacher thinks positively and enthusiastically about people and what they are capable of becoming. Â Sees the good in any situation and can move forward to make the most of difficult situations when confronted with obstacles. Encourages others to also be positive.

Dependable

The teacher is honest and authentic in working with others. Consistently lives up to commitments to students and others. Works with them in an open, honest, and forthright manner.

Organized

The teacher makes efficient use of time and moves in a planned and systematic direction. Knows where he or she is heading and is able to help students in their own organization and planning. Can think in terms of how organization can be beneficial to those served.

Committed

The teacher demonstrates commitment to students and the profession and is self-confident, poised and personally in control of situations. Has a healthy self-image. Encourages students to look at themselves in a positive manner, careful to honor the self-respect of the students, while encouraging them to develop a positive self-concept.

Motivational

The teacher is enthusiastic with standards and expectations for students and self. Understands the intrinsic motivations of individuals, and knows what it is that motivates students. Takes action in constructive ways.

Compassionate

The teacher is caring, empathetic and able to respond to people at a feeling level. Open with personal thoughts and feelings, encouraging others to do likewise. Knows and understands the feelings of students.

Flexible

The teacher is willing to alter plans and directions in a manner which assists people in moving toward their goals. Seeks to reason out situations with students and staff in a manner that allows all people to move forward in a positive direction.

Knowledgeable

The teacher is in a constant quest for knowledge. Keeps up in his or her specialty areas, and has the insight to integrate new knowledge. Takes knowledge and translates it to students in a way which is comprehensible to them, yet retains its originality.

Creative

The teacher is versatile, innovative, and open to new ideas. Strives to incorporate techniques and activities that enable students to have unique and meaningful new growth experiences.

Patient

The teacher is deliberate in coming to conclusions. Strives to look at all aspects of the situation and remains highly fair and objective under most difficult circumstances. Believes that problems can be resolved if enough input and attention is given by people who are affected.

Some Characteristics of an English Teacher

• One of the most important attribute of a good teacher is to be a good communicator. He should be comfortable explaining things and enjoy doing the same.

• At times, a teacher might feel like yelling or shouting at students, but a good teacher is one who knows how to keep the temper in check and act calmly in such situations.

• A good sense of humor is another great tool that helps a teacher to simplify his task. Wit and humor, when applied in the proper manner, can form an important part of a successful teaching program.

• A good teacher must have good time management skills and always value the importance of time. In fact, wise utilization of time is the hallmark of a good teacher.

• A teacher should always adopt a fair attitude, when it comes to making any form of evaluations. He should be fair to his profession and assess students on their performance, instead of personal rapports and likings.

• A good teacher should have the necessary command over the subject matter he teaches. This way, he can be comfortable while explaining things. Besides, he will be equipped with answers of any possible questions that might crop up during the lecture sessions.

• A teacher should be dedicated towards his work. He should not kill his time in the classroom and wait for the school bell to ring. Instead, taking out time and engaging in after-school meetings and activities is what suits him.

• A good teacher should be meticulous and have an eye for detail. In fact, a disorganized person would find the vocation unsuitable and unfulfilling. Well thought-out plans and programs for teaching will assist the productivity of a teacher.

• A good teacher should be a good leader and a good friend. He should also be a disciplinarian and the students must look up to him. However, this should not stop him from acting like an ally under certain situations.

Conclusion

This study investigated the characteristics of effective English teachers as perceived by high school teachers and students in Bangladesh through a self-report questionnaire consisting of three categories of effective teaching: English proficiency, pedagogical knowledge, and socio-affective skills. Overall, the teachers perceived significantly different characteristics than the students in all three characteristics with the teachers ranking English proficiency the highest and the students ranking pedagogical knowledge the highest. The male students demonstrated significantly different characteristics from the female students in socio-affective skills, whereas the high achieving students held significantly different characteristics from the low achieving students in pedagogical knowledge and socio-affective skills.

References/resources:

• Characteristics of the ideal teacher -MALIK KARRAR HUSSAIN JHAKAR, Rawalpindi

• http://lifestyle.iloveindia.com/lounge/characteristics-of-a-good-teacher-1807.html

• Characteristics of a Good English Teacher in Asia Pacific Education Review, http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/EJ752344.pdf

• http://www.brighthub.com/education/k-12/articles/108874.aspx#ixzz1JgRdIxkN

• Characteristics of a Good Teacher, http://www.reacheverychild.com/feature/traits.html

• Safe Learning Environment, http://www.dropoutprevention.org/effective-strategies/safe-learning-environments

• Jane Farkas, in MCOM 520.

• ELT Teacher Characteristics- Michael G. Hines

UNICEF Report “What makes a Good Teacher?”.