ABSTRACT
Educational reforms around the world have centered on developing core competencies among students. Competency-based instruction has thus become a focus in the latest national curriculum guidelines in Taiwan. Efforts have been devoted to reforming education at different levels, including teacher education. To provide authentic contexts for real teaching experience in teacher education, school-university partnerships (SUP) have been advocated as an effective and promising way for preparing future teachers. However, there have been few studies that incorporated SUP and a competency-based approach to prepare teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL). This chapter describes an empirical study regarding the development and evaluation of competency-based teacher education (CBTE) courses with the support of SUP in Taiwan. In total, 150 student teachers participated in the study. Data collected included learning journals and survey scales from the student teachers and feedback from children and schoolteachers at elementary schools. The chapter concludes with suggestions for future research and practices on EFL teacher education.
