Qualities of a Good and Effective Teacher: Slovak EFL Pre-Service and In-Service Teachers’ Perspectives

Abstract

A plethora of researchers have attempted to examine the characteristics of a good and effective teacher in order to enhance the process of teaching foreign languages. In line with those explorations, this study aims at performing a comparison between Slovak pre-service EFL (English as a foreign language) teachers’ and Slovak in-service EFL teachers’ perceptions of a good and effective language teacher. To achieve this objective, a convenient sample of Slovak university EFL students who were pre-service teachers (n = 74) and Slovak lower-secondary and upper-secondary school teachers (n = 63) were employed in the study. Using a 57-item Likert-type questionnaire, independent-samples t-tests were conducted to investigate the potential differences between the perceptions of the pre-service teachers and in-service teachers. Moreover, the 10 highest-mean and 10 lowest-mean items of both groups were analyzed. The research results revealed that statistically significant differences (p ≤ 0.05) were detected in only 12 of the 57 items. Furthermore, a closer examination of the differences and the items with the highest and lowest means indicated that the pre-service teacher participants favored traditional teaching more than their in-service teacher counterparts, who preferred CLT (Communicative Language Teaching) to a greater extent. The potential implications of these findings indicate that the fundamental principles of CLT such as employing plenty of pair-work and group-work activities, facilitating learners’ autonomy and responsibility for their own learning, or varying classroom interaction strategies deserve more careful attention during pre-service teacher training.

Attributes of Effective Foreign Language Teachers: Insights From Ukraine

“…Taken together, both students and teachers demonstrated a considerable degree of convergence on many aspects of effective teaching which is in line with the findings of other researchers (e.g. Metruk, 2020). However, as shown earlier, in-service teachers' views on the effectiveness attributes significantly differed from pre-service teachers on many of the central statements, which signal their professional maturation involving more complicated construction of an effective FL teacher's image, development of a more complex set of cognitions in teachers.…”

“…Research into context-and culture-specific attributes of effective FL teaching and teachers was carried out by Barnes and Lock (2013), Park and Lee (2006), who undertook a quantitative investigation of attributes of effective language teachers in Korea. Comparative studies of English as a FL teachers' and students' perceptions of effective teaching come from the context of Iran, Slovakia (Metruk, 2020;Moradi and Sabeti, 2014;Tajeddin and Alemi, 2019). Research into characteristics of effective FL teachers in the USA was undertaken by Bell (2005), Brown (2009), to name just a few.…”

Male and Female University Students’ Perceptions of an Effective EFL Teacher

“…A 4-point Likert-type scale questionnaire (Appendix 1) was used to measure the respondents' perceptions of effective language teachers. It was prepared by Metruk (2020), who completed extensive review of existing questionnaires intended to measure the same concept by Al-Mahrooqi, Denman and Al-Siyabi (2015), Moradi and Sabeti (2014), and Shishavan and Sadeghi (2009). This research instrument had been revised three times, using help of author's colleagues and peers, which resulted in deleting 4 items (these seemed to somehow duplicate other statements) and reformulating 7 statements (to make them clearer to the respondents) when compared to its initial version.…”

Examining the Professional Quality of Experienced EFL Teachers for Their Sustainable Career Trajectories in Rural Areas in China

“…In the interactive process, EFL teachers, as agentic and developing persons [70,76], were able to shape and develop their professional quality [10]. To a large degree, teacher quality shaped and was shaped in the contexts in which they lived, echoing the ecological turn in the field of foreign language teacher education [10,71,72], Furthermore, prior studies were inclined to adopt qualitative [12,17] or quantitative [14,16] research design to explore teachers' professional quality, but this study focused on EFL teachers in rural areas and uncovered the global and dimensional profiles of their professional quality using mixed research methods. Thus, it might be a timely addition to the literature.…”

“…As an important agenda, language teacher professional quality has gained in popularity in LTE research [8][9][10], particularly along with some updated teaching methods including communicative language teaching (CLT), and more recently task-based language teaching (TBLT) and content and language integrated learning (CLIL). Some scholars have paid special attention to the quality of expert or effective EFL teachers [10][11][12][13][14][15]. Research into teacher excellence has been conducted to interpret and improve their professional experiences and beliefs [16], thus providing an effective reference for more inexperienced teachers [17], especially those working in underprivileged rural areas.…”