Mentoring Vietnamese preservice teachers in EFL writing

Mentors have individual beliefs on what is and what is not important for developing preservice EFL teachers. Five factors for mentoring have been previously identified by the author, namely, personal attributes, system requirements, pedagogical knowledge, modelling, and feedback. A literature-based survey instrument gathered 100 Vietnamese preservice primary school teachers’ perceptions of their mentoring for EFL teaching. Results indicated acceptable Cronbach alpha scores for four of the five factors, that is, personal attributes (.74), pedagogical knowledge (.89), modelling (.81), and feedback (.75); however, system requirements was .08 below the accepted .70 level. More than 50% of mentees perceived they had not received mentoring for developing their teaching of English writing on 29 of the 34 survey items, particularly with system requirements and modelling of EFL practices. Tertiary institutions may employ the survey instrument to gauge the degree and quality of mentoring in subject-specific areas such as EFL writing in order to benchmark and enhance mentoring practices.