Studies conducted so far have mainly focused on investigating the characteristics of effective foreign language teachers to understand the role of teacher effectiveness in the process of language learning, while there is scarcity of studies focusing on the perceptions of the characteristics of effective foreign language teaching of the students of Department of English Language Teaching (ELT) and Department of English Language and Literature (EL&L) who are the major candidates of English language teaching profession in Turkey. Thus, this study aims to examine the perceptions of prospective English teachers with regard to their department and demographic variables. Effective Teacher Questionnaire [10] was used to obtain data from ELT (n = 212) and EL&L (n = 192) students. The t test results indicated that there was a significant difference between ELT students' and EL&L students' perceptions of an effective foreign language teacher with regard to the mean scores in favor of the former. Also, the t test results indicated that there was a significant difference between daytime students and night-time students with regard to the mean scores. In the light of the findings, some practical recommendations are provided.