Developing Electronic Teaching Portfolios: A Way to Success for Preservice Teachers

This pilot study examines the role of the electronic teaching portfolio application in a Chinese language teacher education program content course. As part of the course requirements for Supervised Teaching of Chinese, ten graduate students developed electronic teaching portfolios via the open-source tool WordPress. In reporting the process and the product, we show that preservice teachers, while developing their portfolios, were directed to reflect on and think critically about learning objectives, thereby building competence and skills by the completion of the project. More precisely, these student teachers gained the following: (i) a better understanding of requirements for Chinese-language teachers in the real world; (ii) a greater commitment to a teaching career in the K-12 setting; (iii) improvement of high-level critical and reflective thinking; (iv) an increased sense of responsibility; (v) stronger English writing skills, and (vii) enhanced appreciation of professionalism. The results of this study show that having preservice teachers create e-portfolios encouraged and even empowered them to become more qualified teaching candidates. The effects of the skills gained as a result of this program will be discussed along with suggestions for enhancing Chinese-language teacher education. 摘要:本文探讨电子教学档案在对外汉语教育课程中的应用。十名职 前对外汉语教师借助 WordPress 创建教学档案,其制作过程及成果显 示,建立个人档案是职前教师学习和自我提升的重要途径。具体而言, 他们的收获如下:(一)对对外汉语教师的现实要求有了更好的理解; (二)对 K-12 教学事业有了更大的承诺;(三)提高了批判性思唯 能力;(四)增强了教师责任感;(五)提高了英文写作能力;(六) 提升了专业素养。研究表明,要求职前教师建立电子档案可以有效地 1 I thank Danielle Mirliss and William Otskey from the Teaching, Learning and Technology Center, Seton Hall University for their tremendous assistance with this project. I am also grateful to Michael Stone, Director of the Language Resource Center, for discussing some of the issues addressed in this paper and offering suggestions to clarify them. Chen Developing Electronic Teaching Portfolios: A Way to Success for Preservice Teachers © 2017 The Author. Compilation © 2017 Journal of Technology and Chinese Language Teaching 67 帮助他们成为合格的对外汉语教育工作者。基于上述结论,我们就对 外汉语教育如何应用电子档案提出了具体建议。