Language Teachers’ Development of Decision-Making and Pedagogical Reasoning: A Sociocultural Perspective on Peer Coaching

Decision-making and pedagogical reasoning are two of the underlying skills in language teaching. Integrating sociocultural theory (SCT) into teachers’ classroom decisions can be one novel way to inform their decisions with pedagogical reasoning. This study adopted peer coaching as an SCT-oriented inquiry-based approach to professional development and drew on the concepts of the zone of proximal development and mediation. Two novice teachers of English participated in the study. The data were collected through documentation, classroom observation, teachers’ self-reflection, and video-stimulated recall within the context of online teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic. Conversation analysis and qualitative content analysis of the data showed that the peers scaffolded each other's decisions, actively applying the key tenets of mediation using each other, the video recordings, and the metalanguage they had mastered as mediational resources to achieve their goals in language teacher learning. The findings offer practical implications for teacher educators to implement this mediational approach to professional development in their teacher education programs.