Every evaluation, and eventual selection, of educational and instructional ESL program components--including teachers, is operationalized in terms of specific standards such as utility, feasibility, propriety, and accuracy. This very brief discussion of basic criteria to be used in selecting ESL teachers has no such pretension: All it aims to do is to point out some of the characteristics which are generally deemed necessary for an ESL teacher to be able to help students learn most effectively and reach their educational goals.
Whichever evaluative criteria are considered, Rivers-and- Temperley's (1978) words ought to be heeded: "Learning to use a language freely and fully is a lengthy and effortful process. Teachers cannot learn the language for their students. They can set the students on the road, helping them to develop confidence in their own learning powers. Then they must wait on the sidelines, ready to encourage and assist, while each student struggles and perseveres with autonomous activity" (p. vii). In this perspective, the teacher is essentially a facilitator of learning, a motivator of efforts, a guide of seeking minds, a mentor of children and adults, rather than a holder-of-the-truths who decants factual information into students' memories. She or he is a long way from being the only or even principal resource in the didactic armamentarium. This Socratic function in no way belittles the teacher: On the contrary, it lifts her or him to the rank of educator rather than confining her or him to the role of instructional device and/or schoolroom police.
"The problem of criteria is, of course, the question that has attracted most attention over the years. Apart from the questions of validity and reliability of criteria, there is a not inconsiderable problem in merely classifying the criteria into some sort of taxonomic framework" (Stones and Morris, 1972, p. 147). Space precludes a discussion on how one arrives at criter...