mentoring v
in teacher development, a process by which a mentor teacherprovides
one-to-one support for a teacher during his or her initial teaching experi-
ence. The role of the mentor teacher usually involves modelling good teach-
ing practice, assisting the novice teacher’s integration and acceptance into a
specific teaching context and community, supporting the teacher through
times of difficulty, and facilitating the teacher’s understanding and learning
of the processes of teaching.
mentor teachern
an experienced teacher in a school who works with a student teacher
during teaching practice and gives guidance and feedback to the student
teacher.
also co-operating teacher
mesolectn
see post creole continuum, speech continuum
messagen
what is conveyed in speech or writing from one person to one or more other
people. The message may not always be stated in verbal form but can be
conveyed by other means, e.g. wink, gestures. A distinction can be made
between message form and message content. In a spoken request, for
example, the message form is how the request is made (e.g. type of sentence
structure, use or non-use of courtesy words, type of intonation) and the
message content is what is actually requested (e.g. the loan of some money).
see also decoding, encoding, key^1
meta-analysisn
also quantitative research synthesis
a collection of statistical procedures for a quantitative review and summary
of the results of statistical analyses from a group of related studies that
investigate the same question in a research domain to discern overall pat-
terns and draw general conclusions. Generally, a meta-analyst, once having
identified a set of research questions to investigate in a research domain
(e.g. effectiveness of Spanish-English bilingual programmes on Spanish L1
children’s academic performance in L2 English), (a) searches for relevant
studies, whether published or unpublished; (b) decides which studies to
include in a meta-analysis, using a set of selection criteria; (c) codes each
study for study characteristics; (d) calculates and then averages effect sizes
from the studies; and (e) investigates relationships between study charac-
teristics and effect sizes statistically. Meta-analysis can be contrasted with
mentoring