Language Teacher Mentorship

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Learning to teach has been always a complicated, puzzling and somehow demanding job to do. It involves developing pre-knowledge practically, changing the perception and developing interpersonal skills. Throughout history of mankind, we can see how every generation has passed its knowledge and experience to the next through very familiar social act known as mentorship.
Before starting to discuss the role and characteristics of a mentor, it is necessary to ask a question – What is a mentor expected to do? In these times when everything changes rapidly, it seems crucial to first have a straightforward perception of the grounds needed for every training element and the way it is associated with other elements. There is a range of definitions of …show more content…

(2016) determined the association between professors’ self-perception of mentoring skills and their academic performance. This is exactly what the present study evaluates as one of the perspectives from which the IETLS class is assessed. In the present study, too, the teacher is asked to compare his/her academic performance and the activities implemented in the class. The only difference between the present study and the research done by this group of researchers is that they compared academic performance of the professors during their education; but in this study, the teacher was a graduate in English literature and expected to apply what he learnt before at university about managing a class, different methods of teaching, creativity, and general principles required for a successful language teacher.
Mentoring, according to Yuan (2010) has a dark side. That is to say, negative mentoring takes apart the ideal identities of the student teachers (i.e., an active learner) and replaced a negative different identity (i.e., a controlling teacher). This affected their professional learning and growth in a destructive way. In the present study, negative matters are not taken into consideration due to the mere focus on the purposes which do not include negative effects on teachers and/or