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Abstract
In today’s information economy, education has become the main engine driving the future of countries and of their children. As a result, nations around the world are undertaking wide-ranging reforms to better prepare children the higher educational demands of life and work place in the 21st century. Therefore, more than ever before, it becomes more obligatory to have high-quality effective teachers. Since classroom teacher’s quality alone comprises the single most important factor in determining students’ academic success, effective teachers can easily neutralize the effects of ineffective ones. Although we know quite a lot about effective teacher characteristics, not much is known about effective teacher personality, especially in Turkey. What is the impact of personality on teaching? Studies exploring how teacher personality effects on student academic success, have found that teachers with certain personality profiles may be more effective, depending upon their students' learning styles and the classroom environments (Fairhurst &Fairhurst, 1995). Therefore it would be a good informative reason to learn about the personality traits of prospective teachers and compare these traits with the results in the literature. The Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a self-report questionnaire designed to make Jung’s theory of psychological types understandable and useful in everyday life. Psychological Type is a Theory developed by Carl Jung (1875-1961) to explain some of the apparently random differences in people’s behavior. MBTI results describe valuable differences between normal, healthy people-differences that can be the source of much misunderstanding and miscommunication. The MBTI helps to identify one’s strengths and unique gifts. Information obtained can be used to better understand oneself, one’s motivations, strengths and potential areas for growth. This paper aims at introducing the useful potential of MBTI for identifying effective teachers along with presenting the results of a group of pre-service ELT (English Language teaching) teachers (N=56; F: 47, M: 9) who took the inventory as part of a course called “Individual Differences in Foreign Language Learning” at fall semester of 2017-2018 academic year at a state university in central Anatolia. Results show that these ELT students are mostly Extraverts (73%). ENFJ is the most pronounced type (25%) followed by ENFP (16,07%), ESFJ (14,28%), INTJ/ESFP (10,71%), INFJ (7,14%), ESTJ/INTP (3,57%), and ENTJ/ENTP/ISFJ/ISFP/INFP (1,78%). The data also share that there is a clear preference for Intuition over Sensing, Feeling over Thinking and Judging over Perceiving.