Zahra Nabilou - instructor in English Department, Mofid University

Over the recent decades, language specialists and teacher educators have recognized that what can be of much help in professional development of teachers are efforts on the recognition of good teachers’ characteristics so as to equip language teachers with those characteristics (Rahimi & Nabilou, 2010). However, most of the research conducted on the characteristics of a good teacher has mainly focused on teachers’ perceptions and there has been little work of comparative nature where the views of teachers, learners and other stakeholders (i.e. parents and principals) have been compared. As such the present study investigated the characteristics of an effective teacher perceived by 44 teachers, 300 students, 30 principals and 97 parents. The quantitative data analysis revealed significant differences among the four groups on the four categories. Further analysis also indicated that in all categories of teacher effectiveness, parents ranked first and the students ranked in the last position in displaying positive perception toward the characteristics of an effective English language teacher. Furthermore, the qualitative analysis of data showed that to the perception of all groups of the participants, language teachers are different from teachers of other subjects and they are in agreement about the effect of language teachers’ gender, fame and originality of the teacher on the efficacy of the teacher

Teacher characteristics, Effective teacher, EFL teachers, EFL learner