Using ePortfolios to Investigate the Long-term Impacts of Language Teacher Education Programs

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The purpose of this research is to qualitatively investigate how the English language teaching principles and instruction of elementary, junior high school, and senior high school teachers evolved from their pre-service stage to a period three years into their teaching careers. The pandemic, however, has impacted our plans to visit schools and, thus, the project has been extended for one year.Pre-service teachers use ePortfolios as a means of reflective practice. This entails them writing about their teaching principles and their pedagogical experiences, or critical incidents, that have influenced their principles. In FY 2022, there were two primary milestones. First, the ePortfolio system was enhanced to enable to students to label their teaching principles and link them to areas that they had studied in their university teaching methodology courses. This was done by creating a new tagging system for the ePortfolios. Making use of the tagging system, it is possible to ascertain the dominant teaching principles, primary goals, and frequent critical incidents of a particular class. The findings were published in the journal, Innovation in Language Teaching and Learning.The second milestone was moving the ePortfolio system to a new site. In the new site, the ePortfolios of 200 student-teachers between 2016 and 2022 were archived and accessible to current members and graduates of the program. 484 critical incident reports on the ePortfolios of 174 student-teachers were analyzed to identify the primary challenges that they face when teaching for the first time.