Teacher Effectiveness in the EFL Classroom and its Relationships with Students Learning: a Case Study

Abstract

One question was explored in this study: What features of a EFL teacher teaching seem to influence first level CLLE students’ learning? To answer this question a teacher and 17 students of first level class from the Extra-Mural Foreign Languages Courses at Universidad del Atlantico participated in this study. Classroom observations were conducted during a week and a half in seven class sessions, these classes were recorded and transcribed, a journal from the teacher was collected per class, and all this data was decoded and then analyzed using qualitative methods. In order to answer the question, there main sources to collect the data were explored. Results obtained from the patterns identify from the teacher’s teaching features, such as her different practices while developing the class, her reflections about her teaching skill written on the journals, and the ethnographic information gathered during my active class observation, as well as the information I was able to gathered from those informal interviews I had with the teacher. Findings showed that between the teacher’s teaching feature and students’ learning there was a relation which affect learning, most of the time positively, as students were able to learn even though sometimes the teacher did not do the best practices ever.