The purpose of the present study was to investigate the characteristics of effective EFL teachers from the perspectives of preparatory program Turkish EFL students. To achieve this purpose, 93 preparatory program Turkish EFL students from the Foreign Languages School of a state university located in the west part of Turkey participated in the study. The questionnaire designed by Salahshour & Hajizadeh (2013) was utilized in this study by the researcher with some minor modifications on it. The findings of this study showed that being enthusiastic and lively, having interest in his/her job and feeling responsibility for teaching, being creative and spontaneous, being self-confident, having a loud and clear voice and having patience with students were the prominent personal traits of effective EFL teachers. The findings also revealed that the majority of the students viewed their teacher as an effective EFL teacher because s/he presented the topic via a variety of examples, had adequate level of linguistic knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and communication skills and dealt with them individually and s/he was patient to them. Lastly, the findings of this study regarding (a) command in English, (b) teaching methodology, (c) evaluation method, (d) amount of teacher's emphasis on different language skills, (e) mastery over teaching, (f) teacher-student relationship and (g) classroom management were in line with those of previous studies conducted by other researchers in the related literature.