Investigating Inspiring English Lecturers in a Faith-Based Educational Institution : EFL Learners ’ Perception

This article describes English as Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ perception on an inspiring English lecturer. This study was done through a survey to 230 EFL learners of State Islamic Institute of Tulungagung, a small district in East JavaIndonesia, in order to get underlying basis of making a decision on learning policies for the sake of creating inspiring English teachers who are influential toward the success of English teaching and learning process. The instrumentStrategy Inventory for Students’ Perception on Inspiring English Lecturers (SISPIEL)was developed in accordance to reviewing some related research articles about an inspiring teacher. The study reveals that to be an inspiring English lecturer, one should posses three skills namely attitudinal skills which are divided into three areas i.e. intellectual, emotional and spiritual, in addition to teaching technique strategies and skills of changing students’ learning style. Finally, the results of this study offers pedagogical considerations which are mainly useful for those running teacher training education program and those who are concerned in English education as well as suggestions for future research.


A. Introduction
English language in Indonesia has taken a special attention due to the fact that people's awareness on the importance of English as the main means of communication in this global era is getting increase.English has become a compulsory subject for Indonesian students since elementary school level.Yet, with the implementation of 2013 Curriculum since 2013, English is not anymore formally taught in elementary school.Instead, it will be as a compulsory subject in Junior High School.Some people think that it is too late to start teaching English in Junior High School, so that there are many elementary schools in Indonesia making a policy that English is still taught as either local content course or extra-curricular course in Elementary school level.In addition, parents start teaching their children English earlier by enrolling them to kindergarten schools in which English is taught.This indicates that English keeps being considered as an important subject.
Most parents put the hopes on the success of their children learning English much on the English teachers, so that English teachers have significant roles and responsibility for the successful process of teaching and learning English.One of the indicators of the success is that learners' English competence is getting improved.An English teacher is then not only responsible to transfer English language knowledge during the process of English instruction but also to conduct good teaching and learning practices in order to help EFL learners to get success in learning English.The one of the serious constraints that they have in learning English as their foreign language is that lack of confidence which is indicated by keeping silent during the instructional process, being afraid of making mistakes.This leads students to be passive learners of EFL.Accordingly, to be an inspiring teacher who is powerful to change the learners' mindset of learning English is critical.
The above-mentioned phenomena becomes an important underlying consideration for any educational institution-such as state Islamic institute of Tulungagung-which runs English education programs or teacher training education to make an appropriate decision and or policies dealing with producing inspiring English teacher.The English lecturers engaged in the problems should also be a model of an inspiring English teacher that might be imitated by their students who are the candidates of English teachers.Accordingly, it is significant to conduct a study on an inspiring English lecturer from the students' points of view.The focus of the study was on finding out the answer of a question-what the EFL students' perception on an inspiring English lecturer is.

B. Literature Review
An inspiring teacher as according to McAleavy (2014) is characterized by establishing positive classroom atmosphere which can only be conducted by some of the following deeds: a. Give genuine warmth and empathy towards all students in the classroom; b.Respect for the students both in his behavior and the use of language; c.Praise students for effort towards realizing their potential; d.Seek and honor students' choice and input; e. Ensure that all students know he/ she expects the best efforts in the classroom.
It is further stated that the key indicator of highly effective teaching is more on attitudinal than technical skill which includes enthusiasm for teaching, positive relationship with students, and high level of motivation and commitment.He/She is strategic in managing his/her classroom, behavior, time, any resources efficiently and effectively, implementing clear instruction and assessment including the skillful use of questioning and giving feedback in order to make the students get more involved in the learning process.An inspiring teacher has closely also linked to the quality of relationship with his/her students in a way to create a last long independent learning.
Parallel to this, DuNeen (2013) states that there are twenty five (25) things a successful teacher do differently.Those can be grouped into 3 domains, namely teaching, professional development, and student-teacher relationship.Concerning teaching domain, a successful teacher should have clear objectives and a sense of purpose and should be able to live without immediate feedback.He/she can teach holistically by taking the whole students into account.Meanwhile, dealing with professional development, a successful teacher not only masters the subjects taught but enjoys their work, seek out mentor of their own, break out of the box, spend time to explore new instructional tools, and keep curious as well.Lastly, student-teacher relationship seems to have more emphasis to be a successful teacher.He/she is required to know when to listen to students and when to ignore them.Still, he/she should keep having positive attitude and a sense of humor.In addition, to have an expectation to their students' success, he/she uses praise authentically and knows how to take a risk.He/she should be consistent, reflective, adaptive to the students' needs, skillful at giving the students emotional support and communicative with their parents but not to feel being threatened by parent advocacy.Moreover, he/she usually welcomes changes in classroom and brings fun into the classroom.

C. Research Methodology
This study which is aimed at digging up the students' views on what should an inspiring English lecturer be was done through a questionnaire survey toward 230 students of State Islamic Institute of Tulungagung-Indonesia.The respondents ranging from the 1 st up to 8 th semester students were randomly selected.The instrument Strategy Inventory for Students' Perception on Inspiring English Lecturer (SISPIEL) attached as appendix 1 was developed on the basis of consulting a number of related references.It consists of three domains.The first is Attitudinal Skills which is broken down into three areas, namely intellectual, emotional, and spiritual.The second is Technical Teaching Strategy which is obviously developed into ten items.The last domain is related with Students Changes in Learning English.The draft of the instrument was then validated and tried out to students sharing common characteristic with the real respondents.The result of try out towards 10 respondents revealed that the Cronbach's is 0.941 which indicates its excellent internal consistency.The instrument was then addressed to EFL learners of the above-mentioned institute.The collected data was then quantitatively measured which was about finding the biggest number of percentage on each available item to indicate the respondents' highest expectation about what an inspiring English lecturer should be.

D. Findings and Discussion
The findings of this study show an inspiring English teacher should posses at least three skills namely attitudinal skills, teaching technical strategy, and students' changes in learning English.

Attitudinal Skills
The data on attitudinal skills are broken down into three main points, namely intellectual, emotional, and spiritual.The findings of the survey are deliberately described below.a. Intellectual The finding (see table 1) shows that most of the respondents (60.4 %) agree that an inspiring English teacher should master English.Yet, in the openended question, it is interestingly found that an inspiring English teacher does not always master English but he should consistently improve his English.There are 106 out of 230 respondents (46 %) sometimes agree that an inspiring English lecturer should produce scientific works as part of his/her professional development and 50% of them also sometimes agree that he/she should frequently conduct TEFL researchs.Moreover, 52 % of the respondents agree that an inspiring English lecturer should participate in scientific forums such as seminar, conference, or workshop and most of the respondents (61,3%) also agree that he/she develops his/her professionalism in English through attending further study and/or training.It is also found that most of the respondents (49 %) agree that he/she should keep reading English.
The data imply that EFL learners put their expectation on an EFL lecturer to be inspiring if they are intellectual.This is indicated by having such indicators as to master English, consistently develop their profession by producing scientific works through doing research, to attend either scientific forum or further study, and to keep reading as well.To keep reading leads him/her to be more academically improved.Research revealed that teacher modeling of reading practice brings the students about nurturing good reading habits in English (Iftanti, 2015) and that promoting lifelong reading habit increases the chance that children become effective readers and engage in reading for the rest of their lives (Sanacoro (2001) in Henri et. al, (2007) which will further support the academic success (Broaddus & Ivey, 2001).The last four items which were developed to validate some previous statements indicate that most respondents ranging 57.4% up to 65.6% disagree with the statements stating an inspiring English lecturer should not be competent in English, not produce any scientific work, not develop his/her English professional and not master English.It means that to be competent in English is one of the requirements to become qualified EFL lecturer that contributes to high quality teaching and will furthermore inspire the EFL learners as prospective teachers to be inspiring EFL teachers.As mentioned in Education in Indonesia: Rising to the Challenge that the precondition for high-quality teaching is high-quality teachers (OECD, 2015).

b. Emotional
Regarding the area of emotion (see Table 2), as revealed from the respondents' opinion (see table 2), 76 % of the respondents agree that an inspiring English lecturer should be patient; 77.8 % of them agree that he/she should be kind, and 85.6% of them agree that he/she should have self confidence.These indicate an expectancy of the EFL students to have an English lecturer with those qualities and he/she should be able to educate his/her students to be an English teacher (an English instructor at primary and secondary school levels).As revealed by Lamb & Wedell (2013) that inspiring teachers can be admired for quite distinct qualities clustered into the notion of kindness/patience which combined with valuing of the teacher-learner relationship.In addition, 83% of the respondents agree that an inspiring English lecturer should be the one who is respected and becomes a good model (56.9%), as stated by Dornyei & Csizer's (1998) that one out of the ten commandments to motivate learners is to put himself as a good model by showing and exemplifying good deeds gearing to create good learning atmosphere.This means that he/she should keep being a good model in conducting English instructional activities which brings about becoming respectful.
The respondents (63.9%) also agree that an inspiring lecturer should be diligent in a way to improve his/her teaching quality, improve his/her professionalism, and to encourage the students' learning practices.This is parallel with a study of Sammons et.al (2014) state that the evidence of inspiration is framed in some ways such as immediate students' engagement in classroom and a lasting effect on students' aspiration and self concept or interest in a particular subject.Yet, they somewhat agree that an inspiring English lecturer in one hand should be protective and on the other hand, he/she should not be in that state.Protecting EFL learners from disadvantageous qualities such as lazy, dishonest, indiscipline, dependent, and afraid of making mistake in practicing the language is critical to produce successful EFL learners.Still, some of them think that to be an inspiring English lecturer; one should not be too much involved in the students' interest.
In addition to the above mentioned traits, most of the respondents (49 %) agree that an inspiring English teacher should be independent in a way that he/she should be recognized and valued as individuals and 72% of them agree that he/she should be discipline.Most of the respondents (55.6%) think that an inspiring English lecturer should be humorous which can create a fun learning atmosphere.This means that college EFL learners prefer having the classroom as a fun place to learn and making learning enjoyable and engaging as in line with Lamb & Wedell (2013) and McAleavy (2014) who found that Indonesian EFL learners favor more on that novel method of teaching.However, 40 % of them somewhat agree with the quality because fun learning atmosphere can be created through various ways other than being humorous.For example, making use of learning resources e.g.action songs is proven to be effective in creating joyful and educative EFL learning atmosphere (Nurhayati, 2014) which then yields in positive students who are motivated to learn (Zhang, 2012); using interesting media or using interesting picture series can increase the students'motivation in EFL class (Nurhayati, 2014) and using language learning tool, e.g.game which not only offers students a fun-filled and relaxing learning atmosphere (Chen, 2005;Nurhayati, 2008) but also builds confidence (Aslanabadi & Rasouli, 2013).
More importantly, 80% of the respondents require an inspiring English lecturer to be smart in motivating students to learn English.To be inspiring means to motivate learners (Dornyei & Csizer's, 1998) and making learners recognize a real need to accomplish learning goals and providing them with the motivation to learn is one of the best steps to facilitate effective learning (Humaida, 2012).However, motivating does not mean being totally absent from getting angry, as found that 40% of the respondents give an excuse that an inspiring English lecturer might sometimes get angry for finding some unexpected learning situation.
Interestingly, it was found that 70% respondents agree that an EFL lecturer is considered inspiring whenever he/she can build good relationship with the students and to accept and understand students' attitude (64.7 %).Creating and maintaining relationships was a highly effective strategy to motivate students in an EFL classroom (Kassing, 2011).This implies a necessity that he/she should know how to appropriately behave and communicate with his/her students having various attitudes.Teachers as revealed in the study of Maulana et.al. (2011) have a more favorable view of the learning environment and students' perception of teacher interpersonal behavior are associated with their learning motivation (Den Brok et.al, 2005) and certain aspects of teacher behavior and teacher-student relations were identified as significant in shaping students' intrinsic motivation (Lin & Kuo, 2013).Meanwhile, the highest percentage-86.9 %-of respondents agree with the statement stating that an inspiring English lecturer should be able to motivate and to inspire his/her EFL learner to learn English.This shows that the most important issue of being an inspiring English lecturer is the skill of encouraging students to be better EFL learners (Rehman et.al, 2014) since motivation is proved to be the most significant predictor of overall performance in English as a foreign language (Alsayed, 2003).Finally, it also needs to be noticed that most respondents (55.6%) agree that an inspiring English lecturer should be able to support his/ her hobbies and consistently improve them.c.Spiritual Area Concerning the area of spiritual as can be seen in Table 3, most of the respondents (71.7%) agree that an inspiring English lecturer should be able to advise the students to do good deeds such as being honest, discipline and working hard.In order to nurture those qualities to his/her students, he/she should provide the students with being a good model.Moreover, 64.7 % of the respondents agree that he/she should be able to remind his/her students to avoid doing bad deeds e.g.cheating, being dependant, and getting lazy.These are unfortunately the deeds that the students mostly do.They do not have sufficient confidence in that they are independent in completing the school works so that they tend to do some cheating while doing the school works.It is not advantageous for building the students' future career as prospective English teachers.As a result, an inspiring English lecturer should be able to encourage his/her students to consistently and sustainably learn in order to strengthen and enrich their intellectual and behavioral skills useful for their future career.Thus, if the course is not appropriately linked to their future career, it will bother the EFL students' motivation to learn.This is proved by Bahous, Bacha, & Nabhani (2011) that EFL learners are not motivated partly because of the unclear link between their major course and future career.This study (as shown in table 3) also shows that 66.5 % to consistently support their students to learn is one of the indicators of being an inspiring EFL lecturers.More interestingly, the finding shows an inspiring English lecturer especially the one teaching in a faith-based institute should be religious-as close as to God in a way of either his behavior or his manner (61.3%) and has religious-based behavior and practices (53.4%).

Technical Teaching Strategy Domain
In relation to the domain of technical teaching strategy (see Table 4), what is considered to be an inspiring English lecturer by most of the respondents is the one who prepares his/her teaching well (90%); plans and develops a flexible, coherent, balance, and diversified school-based curriculum (61 %); makes good use of the learning objectives and learning outcomes provided in the English language curriculum framework (56.9 %) and sets clear targets and objectives for each stage to make sure the continuity with the curriculum of different levels and key stages (50.86 %).This supports the excellent indicators set by Chief Executive's Award for Teaching Excellence (2014/2015) used to decide Teaching Practices for English Language Education Key Learning Area which includes four domains.One of them is a professional competence domain consisting of two areas, namely curriculum and teaching which are indicated by some performance indicators such as strategies and skills and professional knowledge and attitude.
Moreover, only 3 out of 230 students (1.3%) who disagree that an inspiring English lecturer develops strategic planning of learning time and activities to ensure learning attainment of the learning targets with desired learning outcomes.This is in line with a study of Lamb & Wedell (2013) revealing that inspiring teachers are themselves inspired-the ones who have strong commitment to teaching.Most of them (66.66 %) think that an English lecturer is considered inspiring if he/she has strategic learning time and activities useful for making sure that the learners attain their learning targets with the desired learning outcomes.It is also reported that 74.7% of the respondents expect an inspiring lecturer to be able to plan classroom activities well.The other indicators of being an inspiring English lecturer as found in this study (53.47 % ) reveal that the ability of designing and or adapting learning modules as instructional materials appropriate with the learners' various needs, interest, and abilities.Furthermore, 73.47% of the respondents assert that an inspiring English lecturer should be active update new innovative teaching strategies and 46.08 % of them agree with the requirement of an inspiring English lecturer to find new references for his instructional materials.Finally, 121 out of 230 respondents (52.6%) think that an English lecturer is considered to be inspiring if he/she can facilitate EFL learners in learning English and have good classroom management.This is consistent with Bahous et al. (2011) that creating a relaxed atmosphere in the class helps EFL learners to be engaged in the target language.

Students' Changes in Learning English Domain
The result of the survey as reflected in Table 5 shows that an inspiring English lecturer should have power to affect the EFL learners' learning style into more autonomous and independent in the learning process both in and out of the classroom as inspirational quote of Galielo Galilei (Bond, 2006) stating that "You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself."Lamb & Wedell (2013) in their study also found that an inspiring English teacher is the one who can change students' pervasive view about English to be fun subject to learn.This present study also found that 73.04% of the respondents an English lecturer is considered to be inspiring if he/she can change the EFL learners to be more competence in English and to be more independent learners.Again, this finding supports the previous research conducted by Lamb & Wedell (2013) stating that an inspiring English teacher is that the one who can conduct motivational teaching-teaching that inspires learners not only to do the teachers' bidding in the class but also to study independently of their own volition in a course of time through the changes of adolescent life.
In addition, most of the respondents agree with the statement stating that an inspiring English lecturer is able to motivate (74.3%) and inspire (65.2%) the EFL learners to get success in learning English.The important predictor of success in EFL as revealed in the study of Tsiplakides & Keramida (2010) is students' attitude towards EFL which is very often influenced by a teacherstudent relationship, general classroom atmosphere, and the use of authentic teaching materials and activities.Meanwhile, Kelsen & Liang (2012) in their study highlighted that the most significant indicators of success include hours spent studying English, participation in the English taught program, first language ability, and attendance and reading for pleasure.Furthermore, the respondents of this study expect that an English lecturer is taken into account to be inspiring if he/she can act as a role model with abundant achievement in English instruction as in line with Alshehri (2012) stating that EFL teachers should act as role models, recognize the weakness and the strengths of their students in English, and are ready to answer their students' academic questions.The other point that can be noticed is that an inspiring English lecturer is indicated by having skill to develop EFL learners' life-long language development.Another indicator of being inspiring English lecturer as stated by 70 % of the respondents is that he/she should be able to help learners to take their responsibility for their learning as in line with an inspirational quote by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (Bond, 2006) that "The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes, and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself."Meanwhile 63.9 % of them state that he/should be able to use innovative learning experience to boost learners' confidence in using English in free expression, imagination, and creativity.Finally, 58.2 % of the respondents require an inspiring English lecturer should be able to promote learners' keenness and motivation to participate in activities leading to improvement of knowledge and skills in English and 66.08% of the respondents state that he/she should be able to broaden and deepen the EFL learners' competencies in skills of English and its knowledge.
From the open question dealing with attitudinal skills included in SISPIEL, it was revealed that in accordance to the students' opinion, an inspiring English lecturer should possess abundant variety of qualities namely, to be kind, friendly, respectful, motivating, professional, smart, diligent, humorous, intellectual, religious, good personality, qualified, patient, stylist, calm, and responsible.Furthermore, they state that his broad knowledge and wide experience should be useful to affect his/her EFL learners.Other requirements of being an inspiring English lecturer is that he/she should produce scientific articles/books and build good friendship with his/her students as parallel to Lamb & Wedell (2013) who portrait inspiring English teachers in China and Indonesia.He/she should also be influential in a way to make his/her students get progress in their learning English and implement strategic teaching process so that his/her students achieve the learning goals.Although they require an inspiring English teacher to be competent and skillful in English, there is an underlying note obtained from the respondents that an inspiring English lecturer should not always master English but he/she should consistently improve their English.
Moreover, as revealed in this study that an inspiring teaching strategy is indicated by having good teaching preparation and good classroom management, motivating, interesting, engaging with online learning, and building good relationship between teachings and materials.More importantly, he/she should have power to change the students' English competence and students mindset that learning English is easy/ not difficult, motivate them to learn, make them to be autonomous learners, care on students' needs, and increase students spirit and power so that they will say: I want to be an English teacher as my English teacher.

E. Pedagogical Implication and Suggestion
This study has conceptualized a two-fold idea that an EFL lecturer is admired to be inspiring if he/she is highly professional, confident and reflective practitioner with abundant qualities intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually as well.It can be shaped by having skill and ability to show a strong engagement with the students, act as good role model both intellectually and spiritually, exhibit good passion for teaching, and promote EFL learners' motivation to be autonomous, independent and a life-long learner as well.This supports McAleavy (2014) who found that the key attributes of highly effective teaching conducted in an inspiring teaching were more attitudinal rather than technical skills because the attributes of teaching considered most important by an inspiring teacher himself was closely linked to the quality of relationships and the need for an enthusiastic, energetic professional persona.Secondly, an English lecturer is also praised to be inspiring if he can conduct a more motivational and effective teaching strategy including developing positive relationships; having good classroom management; creating a positive and supportive climate; providing formative feedback; delivering high quality learning experiences; and emphasising enjoyment in learning which is useful to build EFL learners' confidence significant to achieve their learning goal as in line with Sammons et al. (2014).
Indeed, in addition to possess a wide range of qualities, the result of this study sheds a light on how does an EFL lecturer inspire the students-candidates of EFL teacher-to achieve their teaching profession well so that they can prepare themselves to be inspiring EFL teachers who are able to conduct a successful EFL instruction.Accordingly, it is suggested that to be inspiring, an EFL lecturer is supposed to sustainably improve his/ her strong personal commitment to teaching.Moreover, the institutional education running an English education program should openly support the improvement of the EFL lecturers.Since this study only focuses on EFL students' perception on inspiring EFL lecturers with a relatively small number of respondents, further researcher Specifically, there are some excellent indicators of teaching practicesreferring to excellent teaching-used by Chief Executive's Award for Teaching Excellent (CEATE) 2009/2010 which is organized by the Education Bureau-Hongkong to assess nominations.They fall within four domains, namely, (1) Professional Competence, (2) Student Development, (3) Professionalism and Commitment to the Community and (4) School Development.The first two domains focus on recognizing teaching excellence and the other two on fostering teachers' professional development.