Contribution
Providing effective mentoring to preservice teachers in their field-based practice continues to be a major challenge in preservice teacher education programs, particularly because it requires substantial investments of time, money, effort, and resources. Therefore, in a climate of limited resources, there is the need to do research on possible effective alternatives, e.g., on peers learning from peers in school-based teacher education. It has been suggested that peer mentoring, which in this research refers to the peer learning process among participants who are directly involved in each other's learning by being mentors for each other, might be one such useful component of a comprehensive teacher preparation program. Thus, apart from being mentored by their school practicum mentors, preservice teachers could learn from one another and mentor one another to assist in the development of their teaching practices.However, not much research has been done into the use of peer mentoring as a strategy for developing EFL teaching practices for preservice EFL teachers during their field experience. Therefore, this research advocates the use and benefits of peer mentoring in preservice teacher education programs. This presentation gives an overview of an ongoing study, whose major focus is to examine the impacts of the peer mentoring experience of preservice EFL teachers during thier practicum. A concurrent triangulated mixed method design, that included both qualitative and quasi-experimental techniques, was used to investigate the affect of the peer mentoring on participants' self assessment of instructional practice, personal and professional development. The research investigates the impact of a peer mentoring program by (1) using quantitative data (by the means of survey questionnaire) to assess the instructional practice, the personal and profesional growth of the participants in comparison to a group of preservice teachers who do not participate in the peer mentoring experience, and by (2) using qualitative data to identify the key components of the peer mentoring experience that facilitated teaching practices, personal and profesional growth and explored the percieved benefits and the effectiveness of the peer mentoring experience for the participants (by the means of interviews and practicum journals). The results are expected to indicate that the participants in the peer mentoring program make significant improvements in their self assessment of their teaching practices, personal and professional development. In addition, the study will highlight the essential components of peer mentoring for preservice EFL teachers during their practicum. It is hoped that based on the findings, peer mentoring will be shown to be an effective way to improve preservice EFL teacher's teaching practice, and their personal and professional development during their practicum. The findings from this study should be of significance to a variety of educational groups, interested in peer mentoring to improve the quality of preservice teacher education programs.
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