Mentoring and Student Teacher Identity: A Synthesis Review

Recently, mentoring and its constructive effects on teachers, novice ones in particular, have become the focus of extensive studies on language teaching. This is undoubtedly due to the significance of mentoring in improving the quality of teachers’ performance. Therefore, the present study is aimed at performing an investigative review on some major works in this area in order to examine the role of mentors in formation and development of student teachers’ identity as teachers and in shaping their attitudes towards their profession. It becomes clear that depending on the type of mentoring roles, they may have both positive and negative effects on identity formation of student teachers.  The study finishes with some possible research questions for further research.