Mentoring as a Supportive Way for Novice Teachers in Foreign Language Teacher Development: A Case Study in an Ethnic College in China

Mentoring has been explored from various perspectives under different theoretical frameworks. The situationbased mentoring brings a lot of possibilities and sustainabilities to the student teachers. Given the overview on the literature of mentoring, it can be found that the research about mentoring mainly is concerned with Englishspeaking countries such as US and UK and populates in general teacher education. The research in subjectspecific field receives scant attention, such as in Foreign Language Teacher Development (hereafter, FLTD). Finding few reports from China, especially about the novices in ethnical colleges, the empirical study running through one year from in an ethnic college shows that mentoring is a supportive way in FLTD for supporting novices. Under the framework of sociocultural theory, we found that, in addition to improving of teaching skills, mentoring can (1) lessen novices’ stress and ‘reality shock’ in teaching and strengthen the sense of belongings (2) facilitate novice teachers’ reflection ability and (3) foster novice teachers’ selfefficacy in teaching.