The Role of the Mentor in Teacher Education Programs in Jordan

The study aims to explore empirically how far the roles adopted by the mentors of Arabic language student teaching in Jordan coincide with a model of roles suggested in the literature of teacher training. The results of this study are reported in respect of two qualitative research techniques using evidence from the three rounds of interviews with (11) mentors of Arabic and their (14) students and the observation and field notes taken during fieldwork. The findings provide a detailed picture of the actual roles adopted by mentors of Arabic in Jordan at each stage of the student induction. In the first stage, the results of both interviews and observation and field notes showed that different weight was given to the mentors' roles on both dimensions: the professional and personal. On the professional level, some roles took a major place of mentors' work during the early days of induction. On the personal level, the social relationship between the mentors and their students was superficial so that the communication between them was limited to answering students' requests on the academic side of the relationship.