Interdisciplinary collaboration is one important development direction in Chinese teaching and teaching Chinese as a foreign language. Against the background, in 2018-19, the Department of Chinese Language Studies of the Education University of Hong Kong, together with the Department of Science and Environmental Studies, Department of Psychology, designed a course -- named "STEM and its Application on Language Acquisition and Communication" --for learning Chinese Language through STEM elements combined with psychological theories. The author is one of the three designers of this course. The students who take this course are mostly prospective teachers of Teaching Chinese as a foreign language and Chinese Language. This interdisciplinary course offers participants the opportunities to understand and experience the major approaches in STEM, namely scientific inquiry and engineering design cycle, in solving cross-disciplinary problems in language acquisition and communication. Through the course, participants first identify a problem related to language acquisition and communication, then develop a solution by applying scientific inquiry and engineering design cycle, and finally reflect on the impacts, feasibility, cultural and socio-economic implications of the problem and the proposed solution using an interdisciplinary approach. Participants are required to disseminate their ideas, findings or products to experts in different areas, and are thus encouraged to integrate discipline-based knowledge in problem identification, solution development, dissemination and reflection, facilitating analyses from multi-disciplinary perspectives. Based on the theory of interdisciplinary language learning, this report aims to analyze the learning and teaching achievements of students and teachers in this course, as well as the problems encountered, and discuss the future development of the course. Copyright © 2023 The Eighth International Conference on Teaching Chinese as a Second Language

One of the major teaching challenges of higher education is helping students to bridge knowledge with real life practice. This is especially important in applied fields including medicine, social science, education and engineering. Traditionally, practicum and internship programs are the only means for students to step outside of classroom learning and to connect with the outside world, and a chance to apply what they learn to real life problems. Increasingly, information and communication technology (ICT) is being used to create yet another dimension for authentic learning beyond the boundaries of the classrooms, and in addition afford collaborative and flexible learning mode. This paper details a collaborative effort between the engineering and the education disciplines, in using ICT to support students' professional growth in teacher education. An eLearning platform was created as a result of the joint effort for the training of student teachers in developing their professional knowledge in teaching and learning and gaining understanding of the work of a teacher. Through the platform, student teachers gain understanding about the teaching profession from different people of the education sector; and they can reflect and share their teaching practicum experiences with each other using the online communication tools.
[Copyright of Electronic Journal of E-Learning is the property of Academic Conferences Ltd.
Access via Directory of Open Access Journals: http://www.ejel.org/main.html]