The Portrait of a Good Foreign Language Teacher: A Cross-Interview Analysis of Private Language Course Administrators’ Opinions

Abstract

The attempt to present the profile of a good language teacher is an early arrival, dating back to 1920s. The literature to date abounds with much scholarly attention to exploration of mainly students’ and teachers’ point of view regarding the issue. However, the paucity of research into other different perspectives in Turkey serves as the backcloth of the current study qualitative in nature, which employs in-depth interviews with the six administrators of six private courses in a province in the northeast part of Turkey with the aim of filling this hiatus. The data gathered via individual indepth interviews were analysed via content analysis, in which the researchers went through the transcribed texts to find the recurring themes, enumerate them, create broad categories out of them, and pick excerpts that could support their interpretations. Although it was not intended to provide definitive good language teacher profile, issues such as a finely-tuned classroom authority, energy, tolerance, creativity, a sound knowledge of language, an ongoing professional development, enhancement of student autonomy, good communication skills, and teaching experience were found as the distinguishing effective teacher characteristics, analogous to the previous studies. However, the findings contradict with the seemingly omnipresent tendency towards describing native speaker as good language teacher in the existing literature in that local Turkish teachers were described as effective teachers with their in-class teaching roles, second language learning experience, strong empathy with students while their native counterparts were valued solely for their communicative ability and potential role to add to institution prestige. The current study with a glimpse of Turkey is believed to help capture the essence of the issue by providing a close scrutiny of a different perspective, in turn yield insight for prospective English language teachers and teacher education planners