Professional Development: Fostering Integrative Knowledge and Pedagogy of Japanese language Teachers through e-Portfolio

Abstract

The main objective of this project is to promote teacher collaboration for new curriculum development and assessment for Japanese language education, and for reporting their practices and exchange of ideas. In order to promote professional communication between Japanese language teachers and professionals in teacher education, the author organized virtual learning communities, utilizing two different sites: a Moodle-based website and an e-portfolio system. In using these sites, fifteen participants and four mentors tried to report their daily activities and share knowledge for the improvement of domestic overseas language learning. Through such collaboration on the Web, a model was proposed for fielding small inquiry communities of project participants in order to improve their practice and challenge programs to improve their students’ learning environments and their teaching and management skills. This article reports on a year-long study of Japanese language teacher inquiry groups.