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ABSTRACT
Vygotskian-inspired tiny talks (Zoshak, 2016) and mentor email responses are imagined as a troika ZPD that fosters collaborative dialogue between novice teachers in the practicum and their mentor, and a way for the mentor to gauge how teachers were experiencing and thinking about their own and their partners' teaching. Peer dialogue enabled emotional/cognitive dissonance and emotional support to emerge, which the mentor could then mediate responsively. Envisioning peer and expert mentoring through a Vygotskian dialectic in language teacher education offers a space through which novice teachers can work through being a teacher while being supported when they cannot.
KEYWORDS
Language teacher education, peer mentoring, responsive mediation, sociocultural theory.
1.INTRODUCTION
Novice language teachers typically participate in a variety of learning-to-teach activities during the practicum through which teacher educators, mentor teachers and/or peers mediate their conceptual understandings, emotions and instructional activities. These cultural activities of the practicum, such as constructing and revising lesson plans and observing real-time or videos of teaching with explicit protocols, are part of a mentoring process intended to support teachers as they experience "a roller coaster and a trajectory" of first-time teaching (Bullough & Young, 2002, p. 421). Though mentoring of novice teachers may be as minimal as described in the title of Farrell's (2009) article Here's the book, go teach the class, formal mentoring programmes of novice English language teachers are increasingly being described and researched globally (Hankes & Dikilitaş, 2018; Mann & Tang, 2012; Nguyen & Parr, 2018; Othman & Sernon, 2020; Smith & Lewis, 2018), as are peer mentoring programmes (Nguyen, 2013; 2017). This article explores how expert teachers and novice peer teachers can mentor collaboratively to support teacher professional development.
A triadic mentoring relationship in the practicum often includes the novice teacher (student teacher), the cooperating teacher who mentors the novice teacher's day-to-day teaching in the cooperating teacher's class, and the university supervisor who mentors in varied ways and likely assigns a grade for the practicum (for discussion of the wide-ranging roles and titles of practicum participants, see Malderez, 2009). Research grounded in Vygotskian Social Cultural Theory (VSCT) examining learning-to-teach mentoring has largely focused on the co-construction of a zone of proximal development (ZPD) between two members of the customary triad, the novice teacher, and the more...