strong words. Some of them referred to their feeling towards their experience:

K: I was completely disillusioned when I discovered that my teachers weren't
able to speak English

Ge: My experience was traumatic

J: I was so scared

In the last two instances the learners' experience was reported to be related to
power issues:

Ge: That teacher was too demanding and strict

J: The teacher obliged me to Ieam by heart

Ge recalled that one of his teachers had the reputation of "scary".

Others describe the teaching experience in a more detached third person
descriptive way:

E: My teachers were very bad

Ga: He was cynical

If you can call that a teacher

Most of the participants reported more "bad" than "good" experiences when
referring to language teachers. I was tempted to think that when learners have a "bad"
experience when learning something they tend to extrapolate this "bad" factor to the
teaching side, not exactly blaming the teacher, but tending to see the global experience as
a negative one. However, this is not consistent with the data that was gathered from
learners, since two of the most successful and happy language learners reported very
"bad" experiences and were the ones that notably used very strong words to describe
their teachers. It was obvious that they felt very strongly about it.

Another trend that seem to be fairly consistent, more than half of the students,
was to report a change in terms of the type of teachers they had had. Thus, they said that
their six years of studying English (secondary and preparatory levels) were a bad
experience. The teachers were bad and they didn't Ieam or remember anything. The
experience is reported to be different when they started studying English at the Language
Centre. Here the teachers were "good" in general terms, bearing in mind that the
meaning of "good" has very different connotations (patient, native-speaker, dynamic,
etc). An easy, straightforward conclusion of this could be that teachers are better in the

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