What are the characteristic features of good language teachers?
On answering this question, teachers were asked to mark the 5 most important features of good language teachers out of 16. About half of the offered answers were characteristic features of teachers in general. Most teachers marked elements like good teachers ‘can explain well’, ‘use relevant teaching aids’, ‘make the learners work hard’, ‘prepare for the lessons’, ‘teach about the target language culture’, etc. Teachers showed priority to content knowledge (their subject) over the general characteristic features like ‘empathy’ or ‘creativity‘. More precisely, out of all the received answers, 50 % of the teachers marked only characteristic features of a language teacher (rather than general pedagogic features). About 90 % marked ‘good target language competence’. If we examine the elements provided for teachers to choose one by one, we can see that 82 % of respondents think good language teaching methodology is very important. ‘Openness’ and ‘empathy’ were among the 5 most important fea
