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Volume 12. Issue 3
Article 2

Title
Effective Peer Mentoring for EFL Pre-service Teachers’ Instructional Practicum Practice

Authors
Hoa Thi Mai Nguyen
The University of Queensland, Australia & Vietnam National University, Vietnam

 Richard B. Baldauf Jr.
The University of Queensland, Australia

Bio Data:
Hoa Thi Mai Nguyen (M. A. in TESOL at The University of Queensland and M. Ed. in Educational Management and Leadership at RMIT) is a Ph. D. candidate in the School of Education at the University of Queensland. Her research publications are in the areas of language teaching methodology and EFL teacher education. She has participated in the editorial team of English as An International Language Journal.

Richard B. Baldauf Jr. (PhD Hawai’i) is Professor of TESOL in the School of Education at The University of Queensland and has served on the executive of the International Association of Applied Linguistics for 10 years. He is executive editor of Current Issues in Language Planning (Routledge) and has published numerous articles in refereed journals and books. He is the co-editor of nine volumes in the Language Planning and Policy Series (Multilingual Matters, 2004-2008) and co-author with Zhao Shouhui of Planning Chinese Characters: Evolution, Revolution or Reaction (Springer, 2007).

Abstract
Providing effective mentoring to pre-service teachers in their field-based practice continues to be a major challenge in teacher education programs because of limited supervision resources. Possible effective alternatives like peers learning from peers need to be explored. That is, apart from being mentored by their school practicum mentors, pre-service teachers could learn from one another and mentor one another as part of a formal peer mentoring program to assist in the development of their teaching practices. A quasi-experimental design was used to investigate the affect of peer mentoring on participants’ professional practice in terms of the instructional domain and the results were compared to a group of pre-service teachers who did not participate in the peer mentoring experiences. Judgments by their school practicum senior teacher mentors, their university supervisors and from self-assessment questionnaires indicate that the participants in the peer mentoring program made significant improvements in their scores for instructional practice compared to their counterparts. Peer mentoring may be a key to improving the quality of pre-service teacher education programs.

Keywords:  Peer-mentoring, teacher training, practicum, instruction