This article reports the results of a qualitative study investigating the experiences of five former English language teachers in Hong Kong during their initial years of full-time teaching and the reasons for their permanent departure from the profession. Guided by a theory of teacher identity construction, the study employed a discourse analytic approach to understand the participants’ perceptions of their professional identity construction in discourse and practice. The results of in-depth interviews provide detailed descriptions of the ways in which the former teachers perceived the constraints and enablements to their professional identity construction within the context of their ultimate decision to leave the teaching profession. The findings problematise rigid divisions between different types of teachers and suggest the need to establish new spaces for identity construction that allow for the meshing of different teacher identities.
[Copyright © 2016 Taylor & Francis.]

English is an important foreign language for children in Asia. In certain economies specializing in international trade (e.g., Hong Kong), parents have high expectations on their preschoolers’ English proficiency. Since instruction time for English in preschools is often limited in these societies (20 to 25 minutes per day, 3 to 5 times a day), school principals sometimes have difficulty deciding how the best teachers of English should utilize the time in their English lessons in order to maximize children’s language development. In this study, I compared three types of preschool English lessons: story-telling, arts and craft, and phonics lessons in order to understand the teacher’s use of the language. In particular, I am interested in the number of times teachers repeat vocabularies and the complexity of the sentences used (as indexed by the type-token ratio and mean length of utterance respectively). The idea is that the type of lessons which affords the richest use of language (i.e., where words are repeated and used in lengthier sentences) is likely to stimulate children’s oral language development, which serves as the foundation for children’s future literacy development. An analysis of six 25-minute English lessons revealed that teachers were less likely to repeat words and more likely to use shorter sentences in phonics lessons in comparison to other lesson types. The implication is that for preschools in which English exposure time is limited, a predominance of phonics lessons (e.g., two out of three lessons in a week) might be detrimental to young children’s oral language development.

Learning Study, in the form of action research, provides a platform for school-based teacher professional development in Hong Kong. In each Learning Study, teachers work collaboratively with researchers from the Hong Kong Institute of Education and are actively involved in the planning, teaching and assessing of the research lesson. This presentation describes one English Learning Study conducted on the topic of past tense in a Hong Kong primary school. Findings from students’ interviews, pretest and teachers’ meetings indicated that the students had difficulties in choosing and sequencing lexical and auxiliary verbs when forming yes/no questions and statements (affirmative or negative) in past tense. As such, the Object of Learning in this research lesson is to ‘build up the students’ ability to formulate yes/no questions in past tense and to provide complete answers to the questions”. The presentation outlines the whole process in conducting the Learning Study, and then examines both student learning and teacher learning in the action research.