Many different people were asked the question. And everyone has his own standard of a good language teacher. My idea of a good language teacher is like this: A good teacher is just like a good book, but you can't finish reading it forever. A good teacher is just like a lamp tower, but it cannot go out in your mind forever.
A good teacher has some of the gifts of a good actor. He must be able to catch the attention and interest of his audiences. Obviously, they are your students. He must be a perfect speaker, with a good, strong, clear voice; and he must be able to know what he is teaching, in order to make its meaning clear. As a good teacher, he can not sit still during his class: he should stand the whole time while he is teaching; he should walk around, using his hands and fingers to help him in his explanations, and using his face to express feelings.
However, it does not mean that he will indeed be able to act on the stage, for there are very important differences between the teacher's work and the actor's. The actor has to speak words which he has learnt by heart; he has to repeat exactly the learnt words each time he plays a certain part. His movements and the ways in which he uses his voice are usually before gestures. What he has to do is to make all these carefully learnt words and actions seem zest on the stage.
A good teacher is in quite a different way. His students take an active part in his performance: they ask and answer questions, they obey orders, and if they don't obey something, they will say no. The teacher therefore has to suit his act to the needs of his students, which is in his class. He can not learn his part by heart, but must familiar with it as he goes along. So the teacher should not only have good command of his own subject, but also other issues and hot topics.
As we can see, the character and personality of the teacher is a crucial issue in the classroom, by far the greatest number of responses to the question " What makes a good teacher?" were not so much about teachers themselves , but rather about the relationship between the teacher and the students. So a good language teacher should have his own personality and doesn't hide it form the students, so that he is not only a teacher but also an easy-going person as well.
A good teacher should love his job and do everything in teaching with zest. He should love his students. A good teacher care more about their students than they do about their own teaching. He should teach his students how to be a real person. If he does like this, he can often give us some good advice on how to get on well with each other, how to do something in order, how to do things better and better, and so on. That would be very reliable and important for students all their lives.
To sum up, a good language teacher should have ethic devotion, certain desirable personal styles, and more importantly, he or she should have necessary professional qualities.
It’s my definition of what is a good language teacher, and only my idea.