Effective peer mentoring for EFL pre-service teachers’ instructional practicum practice

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 the 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 do not participate in the peer mentoring experiences. Judgments by their school mentors, university supervisors and from self-assessment questionnaires indicated 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 improve the quality of pre-service teacher education programs