The purposes of this study were: (1) To find out characteristics that an effective teacher should possess based on first-grade students’ perception. (2) To find out what effective teacher is based on first-grade students’ perception. (3) To find out whether female students have different perception than male students. This study was conducted in SMAN 10 Samarinda. The design of this study was mixed method with explanatory design. The subject of this study was 68 students and the researcher took all 68 students as the subject of this study used convenience sampling. The data in this study were from students’ perception of effective teacher. The data were required from questionnaire and open-ended interview. To analyze the data, the researcher used SPSS 25 software to find out mean score of each questionnaire item and content analysis to analyze the open-ended interview results. The results of this study show that an effective teacher is a friendly, caring, enthusiastic, creative and humorous person whose gender, age, and experience is not important. Also, students expect effective teacher to make students feel relaxed, who manages classroom effectively, who teaches grammar effectively, and who is the central of authority in the classroom. Also, students claim that an effective English language teacher has correct pronunciation. As for the gender, there is no significant different between male students’ perception and female students’ perception of effective teacher.
Keywords: effective teacher, foreign language, students’ perception.