A Comparative Investigation of Perceived Characteristics of Effective Teachers in Saudi EFL Context

Abstract

The study in hand is a comparative investigation of the characteristics of effective EFL teachers as perceived by Saudi EFL students majoring in English and Sciences. The participants of the study comprised of two groups drawn from two academic programmes, i.e., English major (EM) and Non-English major (NEM). The researchers used a self-developed 29-item Likert-scale questionnaire to elicit responses of 645 participants of the study. Standard procedure was adopted to achieve reliability and validity of the instrument. Independent-samples T-test was run to calculate the descriptive analyses as well as to identify whether any statistically significant differences exist in the perceptions of EM and NEM participants. The results have revealed that both groups exhibited similarities in their perception towards the personality and ability characteristics of effective EFL teachers; thus, partially rejecting the hypotheses set for this study. The result also indicated that the participants showed preference for personality characteristics as compared to ability characteristics as indicated by higher mean values assigned by both groups.