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This study replicated another research project to find out what factors underlie the Characteristics of Effective English Language Teachers (CEELT) when a large and more representative and homogeneous sample is selected. The CEELT questionnaire compiled by Moafian and Pishghadam (2008) was administered to 1469 Iranian learners of English as a foreign language at various private and public schools in Mashhad, Iran to test three hypotheses addressing the strength of relationship among the characteristics, the number of extracted factors and their cross loadings. The 47 characteristics revealed high correlations among themselves and loaded as well as cross loaded on only five rotated factors when the Principal Axis Factoring was applied to the participants’ responses, i.e., rapport, fairness, qualification, facilitation and examination. The results have several research implications. First, reporting correlation coefficients and the KMO statistic of sampling adequacy is necessary. Secondly, samples consisting of at least 1000 participants should be selected, preferably with a ratio of 30 cases for each item. And finally, cross loading variable must be reported because these cross loadings necessitate adopting a holistic view towards teaching languages and establishing significant relationships between teacher characteristics and learner abilities such as language achievement and proficiency. 

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This study investigated the main sources of Iranian students' demotivation in L2 learning and examined demotivation in relation to students' gender and level of education. To find the major demotivating factors, a questionnaire consisting of 32 items was developed and completed by 327 students. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted to explore the factorial structure of the questionnaire. Based on the results, five categories of demotivating factors were identified: Learning Contents, Materials, and Facilities, Attitude towards English Speaking Community, The Teacher, Experience of Failure, and Attitude towards Second Language Learning. To examine demotivating factors in relation to students' gender and educational level, two one-way analyses of variance were run. The results indicated significant differences between male and female students in terms of three demotivating factors. Significant differences were observed between students at different levels of education with regard to the three demotivating factors. Finally, a multivariate analysis of variance was performed to examine demotivating factors in relation to students' gender and educational level. Significant differences were found between male and female students across educational levels in terms of all demotivating factors except one.