THE USE OF EPORTFOLIOS WITHIN PRE-SERVICE LANGUAGE TEACHER EDUCATION: AN EXEMPLARY IMPLEMENTATION

With rapidly evolving technology, the adaptation to new contexts of teaching and learning has moved teacher educators to rethink new ways of teaching and learning in the training of future teachers (Flores & Swennen, 2020). For example, ePortfolios, as one means of digital learning, have gained prominence in pre-service teacher education (Pegrum & Oakley, 2017). However, many ePortfolio implementations in higher education have substantially focused on the semester-long use of ePortfolios as an assessment tool in a specific course (Boulton, 2014). As the first part of a larger project examining the learning processes and personal growth of pre-service ELT teachers through their ePortfolio experiences, this paper presents a long-term implementation of ePortfolio in a pre-service language teacher education program, which has been developed considering the recent developments in teacher education literature and needs of pre-service ELT teachers of 21st century. The ePortfolio implementation provided a connective and multimodal platform in which teacher candidates present long-term evidence of their academic, pedagogical, and methodological experiences in their journey to becoming language teachers, from university to employment.