Language teacher educators all around the world work in multiple countries and institutions throughout their careers across institutional, national, and academic cultures. As higher education becomes more transnational in some regions (including Hong Kong), it has also become more common for language teacher educators to construct transnational identities. This autoethnographic self-study shares the author's transnational identity as informed by professional tensions he experienced while transitioning to a new institutional and academic culture in Hong Kong as a language teacher educator. As he narrates his story, he unpacks how his philosophies and practices informed one another as he constructed his professional identities in different cultural contexts and contact zones and elaborates on his identity work while revising his practices in his new professional contact zone. As an early-career language teacher educator, he shows how engaging in autoethnographic narrative helped him to adopt a reflexive lens to critically examine his professional engagements across academic cultures and discourses. Copyright © 2025 Wiley.

This article reports a longitudinal case study examining how teachers were empowered to develop their professional capacity to cater for learner diversity through implementing differentiated instruction. Data were collected from multiple sources including lesson co-planning meetings, teacher interviews and lesson observations in a primary school in Hong Kong. The findings suggested a three-stage journey towards teacher empowerment mediated by both external and internal factors. The findings also highlighted the potential interplay of teacher empowerment, teacher professional development and its sustainability, shedding light on a sustainable model for teacher professional development. Copyright © 2024 Springer.

Despite the broadening participation in post-secondary education (PSE) worldwide, the conundrum of disproportionately low PSE enrolments among minority student populations continues to command scholarly attention. Yet, there is a lack of empirical research on the identities of secondary school teachers in the context of minority choice and access to PSE. Taking a critical poststructuralist conceptualisation of teacher professional identity as the complex interplay of macro discourses and policies, school contexts, and individual agency, this study interviewed 11 senior secondary school teachers in Hong Kong and explored the ways in which they perceived and enacted professional identities when navigating dominant ideologies, institutional conditions, and PSE-going possibilities of minority students. The findings revealed their in-situ identity as PSE-for-all educators against the institutional backdrop of the numerical majority of minority students in the study school that also celebrated its demographic and cultural diversity and inclusion. However, the findings also reflected their saviourist tendencies that perpetuated the ethnic, classed, and gendered stereotypes towards minorities in Hong Kong society. Such contradictory identities signified their agentic demarcation from external structural inequalities and ‘minority deficiencies’, thereby seemingly dismissing their responsibility or culpability for the PSE under-representation of minorities. Copyright © 2025 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

High-quality teacher-child interactions benefit children’s learning and developmental trajectories. However, professional development (PD) opportunities for early childhood teachers on how to interact with children are typically insufficient. To enhance teacher-child interactional quality in Hong Kong kindergartens, we designed an online PD entitled Chat with Children, composed of 10 units of learning resources and activities. The objective of this study was to explore how this online PD influenced teachers’ beliefs and intentions regarding teacher-child interaction. Participants were 217 in-service Hong Kong kindergarten teachers. Pre-post evaluation was conducted to examine teachers’ beliefs and intentions in the dimensions of Organization of the Teaching Experience, Group Sensitivity, Encouragement of Communication, and Behavioral Support. After taking the course, teachers had stronger beliefs and intentions to organize interactive activities, address children’s needs with sensitivity, and engage children in communications. Furthermore, teachers believed that they should give children more freedom to settle conflicts, rather directing their misbehaviours immediately. This study provides evidence on the potential of online PD to enhance teachers’ beliefs and intentions regarding how to engage children. Implications, limitations, and future research are discussed. Copyright © 2025 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.

Kindergarten teachers’ performance at work has important implications for the quality of early childhood education and the development of children. Therefore, promoting teachers’ work performance is of interest to kindergarten managers and policymakers. Evidence suggests that professional development opportunities may play an important role in understanding employees’ work performance. However, the possible mechanism underlying the relationship between professional development opportunities and work performance remains underexplored, especially among kindergarten teachers. This cross-sectional study examined whether professional commitment and work engagement mediated the association of professional development opportunities with work performance among Chinese kindergarten teachers. Online questionnaire data were collected from 336 kindergarten teachers working in Hong Kong, China (mean age = 31.6 years; 86% of them were women). Kindergarten teachers rated the availability of professional development opportunities and their work performance. They also rated their professional commitment (indicated by affective, continuance, and normative commitment) and work engagement (indicated by vigor, dedication, and absorption). Structural equational modeling revealed that both professional commitment and work engagement uniquely mediated the association between professional development opportunities and work performance. The findings illustrated how professional development opportunities may enhance work performance by motivating teachers at the affective/cognitive and the behavioral levels. The findings also pointed to the potential utility of supporting the work performance of kindergarten teachers by providing them with ample professional development opportunities and promoting their professional commitment and work engagement. Copyright © 2025 by the authors.

The early years of learning and the transition period are important for novice teachers. This systematic review investigated the influence that training provisions for novice primary and secondary English language teachers in Hong Kong have had on their initial workplace experience. From a large body of literature dated between 1980 and 2023, a final set of 20 articles that met our inclusion criteria was analysed using Kumaravadivelu's (2012) model of second language teacher education (consisting of the five modules of Knowing, Analysing, Recognising, Doing and Seeing). The findings were condensed into three thematic strands: (i) teacher authority: novice teachers can feel lost among different authorities (including ideological conflicts between university and school authorities) and their desire to establish their own teacher authority, but must eventually learn to think from the students' perspective to improve teaching, (ii) teacher socialisation: whether obtaining sufficient colleague and mentor support or not would lead to their diverse experiences, and (iii) two weaknesses in teacher preparation that require attention across both university preparation and in‐school training: the novice teachers were under‐prepared in procedural knowledge and in learning to theorize. These findings provide internationally relevant theoretical contributions that can advance the understanding of both novice teacher development and primary and secondary English language teacher training. From a practical perspective, the findings point to areas that need attention in novice language teachers' transition to the workplace and this may be relatable to international audiences. Context and implications Rationale for this study This systematic review aims to reveal how the training provisions in Hong Kong have influenced early‐year primary and secondary school English language teachers' initial workplace experience. Why the new findings matter Our findings will reveal what impact training

This study aimed at exploring kindergarten teachers’ perceptions and usage of digital devices in their classrooms. A multiple case study (n = 4) was conducted to investigate how in-service experienced (n = 22) and novice (n = 24) kindergarten teachers interpreted the functional significance of digital devices, including the needs and challenges faced when applying digital devices in visual arts activities in their classrooms. A non-randomised convenience sampling strategy was used to recruit four local kindergartens in Hong Kong, whose teachers were invited to participate in focus group interviews. In total, 540 min of interview data were collected. We examined the in-service teachers’ perceptions of the affordances of digital devices in terms of (1) transparency, (2) challenge and (3) accessibility. Based on the teachers’ responses in the interviews, the findings indicated issues related to the use of digital devices in terms of these three areas here. The informants shared how their understandings of film language limited their intentions and usage patterns (including frequency of use) with respect to digital videos. Nevertheless, they admitted that digital videos were important tools for facilitating children’s learning and communication with their parents. This study reflects the current situation of technology education in Hong Kong, including how teacher educators perceive the usage and roles of digital videos in early arts education. Copyright ©2024 Routledge.

Teachers are frontline actors in actualising educational innovations. In some contexts, teachers’ professional agency is undervalued. This study investigated teachers’ agency and its related workplace affordances in Hong Kong, which features a centralised-decentralisation education governance system, and a hierarchical work culture. The study was based on 21 semi-structured interviews with teachers, and employed a deductive thematic analysis. Agency enactment was categorised into 1) pedagogical agency within classrooms, and 2) relational agency in the professional community. The factors contributing to workplace affordances were grouped as pertaining to 1) the collegial community, 2) school leadership, 3) access to resources, and 4) availability of time, space, and job stability. Agency-supportive leadership and a favourable collegial environment significantly facilitated teachers’ agentic actions. Teachers did not explicitly resist but implemented emotionally meaningless order in a ‘work-to-rule’ manner. The study contributes to professional agency research as applied to a particular political, regional, and socio-cultural context. Copyright ©2024 Routledge .

This study aimed to explore ESL teachers’ perceptions of online teaching during the COVID-19 outbreak in Hong Kong. A qualitative multiple-case study approach was employed, focusing on the online teaching experiences of three teachers in primary school contexts. Through semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis, rich data were collected and analysed. The findings revealed five prominent challenges faced by the teachers, including inadequate infrastructure, limited technical support and training, classroom management issues, teachers’ limited technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPCK) in ELT, students’ unreadiness and lack of parental support. The study also identified three opportunities arising from online teaching, such as changes in teachers’ attitudes and beliefs in technology, opportunities for teacher learning and experimenting with online teaching practice for pedagogical innovations. Despite the significant challenges encountered, the teachers perceived the online teaching experiences as opportunities to enhance their teaching competence with technology. This study has substantial implications, calling for strategic governmental measures to improve online learning in schools, highlighting the need to integrate technology-focused pedagogies into teacher education, revising outdated school curriculums to enhance students’ digital literacy, providing financial support for disadvantaged students, encouraging parental involvement in online learning and fostering collaborative professional learning communities to enhance English teachers’ TPACK. Copyright ©2024 Taylor & Francis.

It is essential for second/foreign/additional language teachers to develop their digital competence in digital environments. This article explores language teacher development in digital technology integration in terms of exploration, communication, collaboration, and reflection (ECCR). It presents the results of a study that investigated how language teachers explore, communicate, collaborate, and reflect for technology-enhanced language teaching (TELT), how they approach ECCR, how much they engage with ECCR activities, and what support they need to improve their competence in TELT. Data were collected from an online questionnaire and semi-structured interviews with groups of in-service language teachers in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Findings indicate that the teachers in both countries are engaged with various ECCR activities with different interests and competencies in their contexts. They enhance our understanding of language teacher development and provide implications for professional development with ECCR. Copyright ©2024 Online Learning Consortium.