Supporting a pre-service English language teacher's self-determined development

In this qualitative case study, we follow the development of an initially struggling pre-service teacher (PST) on an under-resourced teacher education programme in order to understand the interplay between her cognitions, emotions and motivation on one hand, and the mentoring she received, on the other. We found that the PST made progress despite the not always suitable mentoring approaches employed, conceivably because her self-determined development was primarily guided by her own developmental needs, rather than the mentoring strategies put in place. Implications for mentors are to ‘meet’ their mentees where they are, using elicitation-based mentoring formats to avoid judgementoring.