This article reports on the views of selected Southeast Asian and Mexican second language teacher education students regarding the characteristics and pedagogical behaviours of good EFL instructors. A total of 116 participants from Mexico, Brunei, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Vietnam took part in the current investigation. These countries have all been characterized as pedagogically conservative and slow to adopt educational innovations. Data was gathered using the repertory grid technique and was subjected to content, cluster, and principal component analyses. Results foregrounded the importance placed on teachers’ positive personality traits. Most significantly, findings indicated a preference for modern teaching approaches among the research participants, despite the pedagogic conservatism of their home countries.