Effective Foreign Language Teacher

Abstract

To explain the language learning process, numerous theories and assumptions have been developed. These theories, normally influenced by developments in the fields of linguistics and psychology, have inspired many approaches to the learning and teaching of foreign languages. Common approaches to language learning in education explain how people learn a given language, and have their direct application to the educational process. Relatively, pedagogues rely on such approaches in order to design suitable instructional systems that guide teachers towards achieving success in their profession. However, education in the twenty-first century is mainly about developing lifelong learning and lifelong skills. Correspondingly, the twenty-first century language learners need to be engaged in highly collaborative and personalized models of learning. Consequently, effective language teachers are those who are able to develop relevant strategies to build the classroom community which provides a safe environment where individual learners can discover, create, collaborate, communicate, and reflect on their own learning goals. Because teachers have a powerful, long-lasting influence on their learners, the question arises as to what is an efficient foreign language teacher. Therefore, the research aims at investigating foreign language teachers’ and learners’ attitudes towards the criteria of an efficient foreign language teacher. The research opts for online questionnaires directed to foreign language teachers and learners to extract non-statistical data with regard to their views and attitudes. The first questionnaire has been administered to forty teachers of English at the department of letters and English language, in the University of 8 Mai 1945- Guelma; Algeria. The second questionnaire has been directed to sixty master one students from the same department. The collected results have shown that both teachers and students believe that an efficient foreign language teacher is empathetic, flexible, technologically capable, updated, pragmatic, linguistically educated, classmate, experimental, open-minded, researcher, doer, and hoper of the best.