Trust is essential in any kind of peer-based mentoring. Taking a sociocultural view, this study focuses on how trust emerges relationally in a higher education context where colleagues observe and give feedback on one another's teaching. The term peer mentoring refers here to a collaborative approach in which faculty staff observe and give…

This study examines, from a sociocultural perspective, the factors that explain why a group of seven Korean students attending an undergraduate business program in a US university are initially labelled as silent participants when first engaging in group work, and how these factors impacted the students' overall adjustment process. Data came from…

The social basis of a teaching profession is created through behavioural and cultural patterns, specific artefacts, and their connection to certain institutional practices. The purpose of this study is to discover the conditions that structure the teaching profession in a cultural context and to find out what it is to be a foreign language (FL)…

We draw on Rampton's "Crossing: Language and Ethnicity Among Adolescents" (2014. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge) notion of "crossing" to explore contestations in ethnolinguistic, cultural and racial affiliations at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), a university built for "Coloureds" in apartheid South Africa, but…

The field of game-mediated L2 learning has grown exponentially, and much has been discovered about the potentials of game-mediated interactions for L2 development, yet the fine-grained dynamics of player-game interactions and how they come to facilitate and afford L2 development are still largely underexplored. To address this gap in the…

This contribution gives an account of the results of an action research in which a task-based plurilingual programme was implemented with postgraduate students of Foreign Languages and International Business. Using a mixed-methods approach, combining questionnaire, interview and observation data, we sought to explore the degree to which the…

Teachers need to know a great deal, in many areas and in multiple ways. Teacher knowledge is a complex tapestry, and teachers must successfully weave the multiple threads. In this article, I present a conceptualisation of teacher knowledge that provides a framework for describing the complexity of teacher knowledge. The framework describes three…

Research into doctoral supervision has increased rapidly over the last decades, yet our understanding of how doctoral students learn scientific thinking from supervision is limited. Most studies are based on interviews with little work being reported that is based on observation of actual supervision. While joint supervision has become widely…

The research reported in this paper adopts a sociocultural approach to the comparative study of Thai and Serbian foreign language learning settings, seeking to identify similarities and differences in student perception of teacher approaches to teaching EFL. The participants in the research included a total of 439 Thai and 106 Serbian students.…

This paper reports a mixed methods study which aimed to improve Turkish pre-service English language teachers' competences and qualifications during their teaching practice experience (the practicum). The analysis of qualitative and quantitative data was framed by a sociocultural perspective focused around individual, cultural, and social factors…

This paper depicts a study carried out in Rwanda concerning university students who participated in a contest to produce short documentary films. The purpose of this research is to conceptualize these kinds of technology-based learning projects (TBLPs) through a sociocultural perspective. The methodology included focus-group discussions and field…

This paper depicts a study carried out in Rwanda concerning university students who participated in a contest to produce short documentary films. The purpose of this research is to conceptualize these kinds of technology-based learning projects (TBLPs) through a sociocultural perspective. The methodology included focus group discussions and field…

Higher education institutions have faced increased social, cultural, economic, and political challenges in recent decades. In this study we used the socio-cultural construct of trust to understand how organizational responses to external challenges impact the relationship between faculty members and administrators. Using extensive interviews,…

Seventeen social educator students were taught to analyze their work activity by means of a Vygotsky-inspired method, drawing on Engeström's notion of an activity system. The method aimed at increasing the consciousness of the students of the structure of work activity system. The participants wrote two accounts of their field-work practice…

Early childhood classroom teachers are often left with little support and guidance as they assume responsibilities as mentor-teachers. The purpose of this collective case study was to explore how a hybrid community of practice comprised of four pre-K mentors and a university program coordinator supported the development of new understandings about…