MENTORING AS MEDIATION: SHIFTING NOVICE TEACHER INSTRUCTIONAL STANCE

This article focuses on how a teacher educator mentors a novice L2 teacher as she works to shift her instructional stance from teacher-fronted to teaching as dialogic mediation. A critical feature of this instructional stance is the ability to foster greater L2 student engagement and participation during large group instruction. Informed by Vygotskian sociocultural theory, data collected from an initial learning-to-teach experience illustrate the unfolding interactional features of mentoring as mediation. This involves both implicit and explicit assistance, shifts in voice, and multiple sequential attempts to frame, reframe and enact teaching as dialogic mediation. Two years later, observational recordings of the novice teacher during her teaching practicum illustrate her enactment of a teaching as dialogic mediation instructional stance as she engages in talk-in-interaction in ways that create greater opportunities for L2 student engagement and participation during large group instruction.