The Impact of Teachers’ Personality on Senior High School EFL Learners’ General English Achievement

Abstract

The present study focused on the effects of teachers' personality on general English Test (GET) achievement among Iranian EFL senior high school students. This study was conducted with the help of 30 male English teachers and 60 male students as its participants. At first, thirty teachers were non-randomly selected among 50 EFL teachers. A questionnaire of Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (1998) was given to the English teachers of a district of Ahvaz as the population of the study to determine the extroverted and introverted ones. The questionnaire determined 15 teachers were introverted and 15 were extroverted among the research population. It should be noted that fifteen high schools of Ahvaz were non-randomly selected (i.e., from each High school two English teachers and four students) to collect the required data. Moreover, the students' English achievement scores on the first GET test and the second one at the beginning and at the end of the fall semester in 2014 were collected. Data were analyzed through SPSS software, version 17 regarding the questionnaire and students' scores in both exams. The results of the descriptive, Mann Whitney U test and Wilcoxon signed test showed that the students with extroverted teachers are more significantly outperformed the students with introverted teachers (p<0.05). The results of this study may help the EFL practitioners consider the teachers' personality as vital criteria which could affect students' language learning.