Senior High School Students' Perceptions Of Effective English Teachers

The paper reports on a study of high school students' perceptions of the characteristics of effective English teachers.The main aim of this study was to identify the most important characteristics as perceived by students and the relevant factors that had an impact on the result.The research questions are as follows: 1.What are the senior high school students' perceptions of the characteristics of effective English teachers? 2.What are the overall rankings of the five attribute categories(Delivery,Knowledge & Credibility,Rapport,Organization & Preparation,and Fairness)of the characteristics of effective English teachers? What are the most important characteristics of effective teachers of each attribute category? 3.Do the perceptions of students differ according to demographic variables,including the senior high school students' English scores,grades,gender,and middle school types?In order to achieve this goal,both quantitative and qualitative methods were adopted in this study,by means of a questionnaire and an interview.The questionnaire was from Barnes and Lock's(2010)research and then revised based on the context of this study.285 high school students from a key high school in Kunming,Yunnan Province,participated in the study,who were selected as a convenience sample.The respondents were asked to measure the importance of the 42 items which were a range of effective English teacher attributes in the questionnaires and then 12 of them were invited into a short interview to express their perceptions of effective English teachers.Data analysis methods used in this study were determined by the research questions.The data of the questionnaires were analyzed with descriptive statistics method.Interview data was analyzed qualitatively so as to uncover factors likely to affect students' perceptions of effective teachers.Descriptive methods were used to find out what were the most important features of effective teachers as perceived by students and the rankings of the five attribute categories and independent t test were utilized to compare students based on their demographic variables.The findings of the study showed that: 1)Students ranked the first item of Fairness the first place.Students valued the fact whether teachers treated them fairly or not.2)Among the five attribute categories,Knowledge and Credibility ranked the first place closely followed by Rapport.It is no doubt that the proficiency and capacity of an English teacher is always paid much attention and valued most.3)The results also provided insights into factors that influenced students' perceptions: a)Students with higher English scores were significantly different from those with lower scores in all the five categories.What is more,all three grades showed significance in nearly half of these items.b)As for the class types,students from liberal arts class tended to wish their English teachers to be more patient;students from science class would like to focus more on teachers' personality like charisma and a sense of humor.c)In addition,female students valued Fairness and Preparation more and male students might wish English teachers to be friendlier,sharing a good relationship with students,caring for students,positive,having charism,and humorous,all of which belonged to Rapport.d)At last,students graduated from unfavorable middle school strongly hoped to form a good relationship with their English teachers and students from key middle schools wanted teachers to pay more attention to their learning background.Based on the findings shown above,implications for foreign language teachers,especially English teachers in Kunming,were proposed.Concerning the emphasis of the teachers on Knowledge and Credibility,teacher education programs ought to invest more than what they did previously on improving foreign language teachers' pedagogical knowledge if they would like to contribute to the process of training effective language teachers.The thesis is ended with pointing out the limitations of the study and suggestions for future research.1)Instrumentation and sampling procedures are not good enough.2)Some other communities were not included such as parents and authorities.It is recommended for further study to use multiple data sources and express opinions of different communities.If the condition permits,future study should explore the cognitive and affective impact on students behind their perceptions.