An investigation of cooperating teachers' roles as mentors during the teaching practicum at distance b.a. program in elt at Anadolu University open education faculty

The present study aims to investigate the perceptions of the cooperating teachersand student teachers as to mentoring roles of the cooperating teachers. 1846 4th yearstudent teachers who enrolled to the Distance B.A Program in ELT at the AnadoluUniversity Open Faculty (AUOF) and took `School Experience II and Teaching PracticeCourse? during the 2006-2007 academic year and their 358 cooperating teachersparticipated in the study. `Cooperating Teacher Questionnaire? and `Student teacherQuestionnaire? which were designed in a 5-point Likert scale. The StudentQuestionnaire was a similar version of The Cooperating Teacher Questionnaire. Theitems of the two questionnaires were matched. The analysis of the CTQ indicated thatCronbach alpha value was 0. 928 and the principal component analysis with ten factorsand 43 indicators explained 60.196 % of the total variance. The results of the studyindicated that cooperating teachers often performed their mentoring responsibilities.Moreover, cooperating teachers indicated that they most frequently provided moralsupport and gave feedback on teaching performance and least frequently facilitatedsocialization of student teachers and interacted with other cooperating teachers. Thescores of the cooperating teachers and student teachers for almost all mentor roles were inline. Student teachers and cooperating teachers differed from each other at a statisticallysignificant level in terms of `providing facilitative information to enhance classroomperformance?, providing moral support.As a result of this study, a reliable and valid Cooperating Teacher Questionnairewith regard to their mentor roles was constructed. This questionnaire has been the firstand the only one constructed with regard to the mentor roles at distance English teachertraining context up to now. The results of this study contribute to increased understandingof cooperating teacher support related to mentoring process at the distance BA ELTprogram during teaching practicum. This study has been the only study conducted indistance ELT teacher training practicum to the present. The findings of this study suggestnumerous possibilities for future research.Key words: Teaching practice, practicum, cooperating teacher, student teacher,mentoring