Training Pre-Service English Teachers to Teach Young Learners Online
Since the pandemic, there has been an emphasis on enhancing pre-service teachers’ ability to teach English remotely through video conferencing and interactive technologies (Sarini Dewi, 2021). The Ministry of Education in Taiwan initiated a Bilingual Digital Instruction Program in 2022 and subsidized universities to train pre-service teachers to design lessons and teach elementary school students English through Microsoft Teams. To provide high-quality online teaching, the purpose of this study is to construct a teacher training model for online English teaching through an investigation of 23 pre-service English teachers’ online teaching practices and the lessons designed for 3rd-6th grade learners with CEFR Pre-A1 to A1 English proficiency levels. The pre-service teachers taught two to five students each for three hours per week for ten weeks in the fall of 2022 and in the spring of 2023. The lesson plans and the online teaching recordings were evaluated by four experienced English teachers using the “Bilingual Curriculum Design and Instruction Checklist (Tien & Chen, 2022).” Both qualitative and quantitative data are analyzed, and a model of teacher training is proposed highlighting online teaching techniques, digital material designs, and applications of reading progress AI grading for young learners.