Collaborative Peer Mentoring in a Practicum: An Innovative Strategy to Cope with Teaching Anxiety

The practicum, a common form of school–university partnership, plays a critical role in developing future teachers’ practice; however, it is often regarded as a source of considerable anxiety and stress. Despite a significant body of studies investigating pre-service teachers’ anxiety, strategies to help them cope with anxiety during the practicum are still under-researched and there are few studies examining this issue outside the Anglosphere. This study examines the impact of a peer-mentoring programme on the teaching anxiety of English as a Foreign Language pre-service teachers in a Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages practicum in the context of a school–university partnership in Vietnam. The study employed a quasi-experimental design in which 32 pre-service teachers were placed in a treatment group and experienced a peer-mentoring programme, and 33 were organized in a control group and followed the traditional model of the practicum. The study collected data from a pre-teaching and post-teaching anxiety survey and focus-group interviews with participants from both groups during and after the practicum. The findings show the effectiveness of the peer-mentoring relationship in reducing teaching anxiety during the teaching practicum. It is found that peer mentoring provided pre-service teachers with emotional support, workload reduction and instruction improvement, as a way to reduce teaching anxiety. Implications for teacher educators on how to support pre-service teachers during the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages practicum in the school–university partnership are highlighted.