Virtual Peer Mentoring for Language Teacher Professional Development: A Framework Towards the Aotearoa/New Zealand Context

This chapter investigates how a virtual peer mentoring (VPM) programme can be effectively designed to enhance language teacher professional development (PD) outcomes in higher education. Since technology now effectively mediates language teaching and learning, it is important as well as challenging for language teachers to learn to adapt teaching to multimodal environments and further develop digital literacy and pedagogy. This chapter proposes a VPM programme, guided by the CARR framework, regarding PD as a cyclic process for language teachers. The cyclic process consists of four key stages interacting with each other: Collaborative planning, Actioning with peer support, Reflecting, and Reimplementing/readapting. This process is afforded by online multimodal environments. The CARR framework is evaluated in a peer mentoring programme involving two tertiary language teachers in an online Chinese programme in Aotearoa/New Zealand. The framework supports multimodal design and practices and the cyclic process emanates a mutually benefiting strategy that values and orients ako—an essential Māori concept, as a result for both teachers’ reciprocal and collaborative learning and development from the unique Aotearoa/New Zealand perspective. This chapter concludes by highlighting the potential of the CARR framework for language teacher education and professional development in the digital age.