“I would like her to…:” ELT student-teachers’ reflections on mentoring practices

Abstract

Attention to the crucial role of mentors in preparing student-teachers for their future profession has significantly increased in the past few years. However, most teacher education programmes tend to assign mentors from the present pool of teachers in schools without any special preparation (Okan & Yıldırım, 2004). This leads to mentoring practices with mentors being unaware of what is actually expected of them. Drawing on this, this study explores mentoring practices and mentor growth areas as perceived by three student-teachers in a 12-week practicum period in a Turkish English Language Teaching (ELT) context. Data was acquired through interviews and student-teacher journals in which they wrote about their experiences with their mentor. The findings revealed that while modelling of teaching and the personal attributes of the mentor were reported as the most common mentoring practices, practices related to feedback, pedagogical knowledge and system requirements were found to be employed rarely. The student-teachers reported the rarely employed mentoring practices as the mentor’s possible growth areas. The study offers invaluable implications for designing and implementing mentor training programmes.