Competency-Based Teacher Education for English as a Foreign Language Theory, Research, and Practice Routledge Research in Language Education Series

Providing a series of chapters, written by teacher educators in three continents, this edited volume explores the concepts, challenges, possibilities, and implementations of competency-based instruction for developing English competencies in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts. Recent trends in education have emphasized the need to develop competencies that connect learning with real-life performances. This need has brought about a massive increase in the number of studies and scholarly works devoted to research into competency-based education. However, for teachers and learners of EFL, it is challenging to develop competencies for using a language that does not seem to connect with their real-life scenarios. The chapters apply the concept of competency-based instruction in different EFL contexts and are structured around three themes:

1. Theory: current thoughts on theories of competency-based education
2. Research: empirical research on competency-based teacher education
3. Practice: integrating competency-based instruction into teacher education

This book offers examples of competency-based EFL teacher education through both research and practical applications. In addition to the innovation in competency approaches, the inclusion of language learning in virtual environments offers a valuable resource for scholars, educators, researchers, and all those concerned with current and future education.

Section I: Theory 1. Competency-based education: A literature review and its practical considerations for EFL teacher education 2. Competency-based teacher education and sociocultural theory: Exploring connections 3. Integrating language teacher identity into competency-based language teacher education Section II: Research 4. Undergraduate EFL majors’ agency in ELT lesson designs 5. Revamping pre-service English reading instruction: The reading specialist training at an education university in Taiwan 6. Developing competency-based teacher education with school-university partnerships: A case in Taiwan 7. Developing teachers’ competencies through intercultural telecollaboration Section III: Practice 8. Impact of different intercultural telecollaborative environments on Taiwanese ELF learner’s communicative competencies 9. Preparing pre-service EFL teachers to design issue-centered English instruction 10. Integrating global competence into elementary school pre-service teacher education of English language in Taiwan 11. Developing competency-based teacher training through mind mapping for interdisciplinary school-based curricula 12. The use of telecollaboration for the development of intercultural competences in CLIL teacher education

Amber Yayin Wang is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at National Taichung University of Education, Taiwan. She has worked on many national projects in English language teacher education for years and published research related to language learning, English teacher education, and TPACK.