A cross-cultural survey of students' expectations of foreign language teachers

This study investigates university students' expectations of foreign language teachers cross-culturally. One hundred ten Japanese, 98 American, and 105 Chinese college students chose five important qualities in good foreign language teachers from a list. Chi-square statistics and the Spearman rank-order correlation coefficient were used for the analyses. A statistically significant difference was found for some qualities. The results indicate that the students of all groups placed importance on some qualities, such as "explain clearly" and "approachable," and that Japanese and Chinese students had some similar expectations in foreign language teachers. Chinese participants placed more importance on pronunciation than did Japanese and Americans. Americans valued creative and patient teachers more than Japanese students did, whereas Japanese valued entertaining, impartial, open-minded, and reliable teachers more than Americans.