Abstract
Introduction
Language teaching is identity work that is deeply rooted in sociopolitical discourses. These discourses influence teachers’ identities layered by linguistic background, ideology, culture, gender, faith and nationality. Such intersectionality of teacher identity and its influence on teaching practice (Kanno and Stuart, 2011) make it vital for teacher educators to incorporate identity work as an explicit focus of language teacher education (LTE). Thus, the identity turn and ensuing efforts to pedagogize identity in teacher education (Lingard, 2009) have influenced teacher educators’ practices.
Despite burgeoning research on pedagogizing identity in initial and postgraduate LTE, identity work during in-service professional development (PD) is still underexplored, largely due to the difficulty in working with in-service teachers for an extended period. In-service teachers
This paper examines the identity work of two in-service English teachers in Hong Kong secondary schools during a PD program on teacher questioning. The program aimed to help teachers reflect on their professional roles, which are externally defined by wider authoritative discourses including the prevailing language education policy. Working with the two teachers, who were employed under the Native-Speaking English Teachers (NET) scheme, provided a valuable opportunity to explore an under-researched area, that is, how transnational native-speaking English teachers construct their identity, and shape their practices accordingly, in an EFL context.
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To this end, the study set out to answer the following research questions:
How did the identity-oriented PD program on teacher questioning influence the NETs’ identity work? How did the NETs respond to identity-oriented activities in teacher learning?
Previous Work
Pedagogizing Language Teacher Identity: Concept, Research and Practice
Identity is essential for teacher educators to understand and advance teaching practice. Clarke (2009), addressing the question of whether teacher educators ‘really need to be concerned with issues of identity in a practical profession like teaching’ (186), answers that identity work is indispensable for teachers to enact agency. Highlighting the importance of understanding wider practices of power and how identity work is connected to them, Clarke argues that only with an agency exercised through identity work can teachers maximize their potential for development. In this regard, Kayi-Aydar (2015) drew on narrative data and showed that language teachers’ identity interacted with and influenced their agency in the social context when they (re)constructed and (re)negotiated identity positions. Language teachers’ identity work, through its mediation of agency, can modify and refine classroom practices (Tao and Gao, 2017) or transform them (Martel and Yazan, 2021).
Teachers’ identity work is deeply connected with their emotions. Yazan (2018) identifies emotions as a contextual factor in his conceptualization of language teacher identity (LTI) that can give teachers deeper insight into their identity work and contribute to the understanding of their practices. Authoritative discourses surrounding language teachers’ practices can cause much stress leading to emotional tensions (Derakhshan et al., 2024). Thus, emotion labor, resulting from implicit feeling rules that drive institutional, cultural and societal expectations of teachers (Benesch, 2017), provides another conceptual lens, along with that of agency, for analyzing and making sense of identity-oriented teacher learning.
Teacher identities are fluid and constantly constructed within wider discourses. Put differently, the way teachers engage continuously in identity work is influenced by relations of power that permeate social, political, ideological and cultural institutional structures and practices, teachers’ navigation of these power relations, and negotiation of their aspirations to address the contextual demands (Yazan, 2018). For language teachers, the nexus of identity work becomes even more complex because their linguistic practices, which are also mediated by power relations (De Costa and Uştuk, 2024), are also involved. Therefore, pedagogizing identity in LTE is critical for teachers to make sense of their agency (or lack of it) and practices.
We find Clarke's work useful for our analysis in that he conceptualizes teacher identity as being intimately related to dominant social, cultural and political discourses and ‘discursively constructed’ (2008: 24) through an ‘ongoing process of discussion, explanation, negotiation, argumentation and justification that partly comprises teachers’ lives and practices’ (Clarke, 2009: 187). As Clarke points out, individuals may start with their
Teacher educators pedagogized identity through various lenses and reported their practice in postgraduate courses (e.g. Flores and Aneja, 2017; Martel and Yazan, 2021; Yazan, 2019) or undergraduate courses for pre-service teachers with limited (if any) teaching experience (e.g. Lindahl et al., 2021; Uştuk, 2022; Uştuk and Yazan, 2024a, 2024b). With respect to pedagogical practice, diverse modalities were utilized for pedagogizing identity, including:
visual methods such as language portraits, through which teachers express their experiences and portray their linguistic repertoires on a body silhouette (Lindahl et al., 2021), and photo-elicitation, in which teachers reflect on their linguistic and professional background through visual aids (Weng and Troyan, 2023); textual methods such as narrative frames, through which teachers create their narratives scaffolded by prompting verbal cues (Barkhuizen, 2014), and critical autoethnographies, by which teachers narrate their experiences focusing on critical issues (Sánchez-Martín, 2022; Yazan, 2019); and somatic methods such as drama, where teachers engage in professional positionings through situated performances and role-play (Uştuk, 2022).
Regardless of modality, teacher educators endeavored to incorporate identity work in formal LTE contexts, allowing teachers to construct professional discourses. For instance, Aneja (2016) found that the analysis of narrative portraits helped participant-teachers negotiate subjectivities, create relationships between their ethnolinguistic profiles and practices, and raise awareness of (non-)native speaker ideologies. Similarly, Yazan (2019) and Sanchez-Martin (2022) utilized critical autoethnographies in LTE settings to investigate the participant-teachers’ use of discourses when they constructed their identities in light of their historical background. In a non-formal education context, Coffey (2015) designed and conducted an identity-oriented workshop for a group of 26 teacher candidates. Utilizing language portraits and autobiographies, the focus of the workshop on linguistic identity encouraged the teacher candidates to acknowledge their own plurilingual background as an instructional resource and elicited ‘a broader reflexivity’ (500). To summarize, identity-oriented LTE can help teachers gain a broader and more situated understanding of professional discourses and their influences on classroom practices.
Language Teachers’ Identity Work in Hong Kong and the NET Scheme
Hong Kong has a history of serving as a bridge between cultures. This status comes with its challenges when educational practices are not attuned to diverse cultural backgrounds or philosophical stances. For instance, Trent discussed the challenges unique to Hong Kong, where ‘the interactive influence of Chinese Confucian-heritage culture and Western ideas’ (2010: 907) had a fundamental impact on language teachers’ identity work, that is, continuous identity negotiation and construction in the process of learning to teach languages (Uştuk & Yazan, 2024b; Yazan, 2018). Trent demonstrated how Hong Kong-based educators’ different cultural backgrounds and philosophical stances shaped their discursive conceptions of
One government initiative that contributes to Hong Kong's multicultural educational backgrounds is the NET scheme. This scheme has been administered by Hong Kong's Education Bureau with a view to increasing the exposure of students to English and ‘enhanc[ing] the learning and teaching of English with linguistically and culturally authentic materials and resources’ at local schools (Education Bureau, 2024). The NET scheme provides schools with subsidiaries to recruit native-speaking English teachers.
MS Wong et al. (2018), drawing on survey data and case-study analyses, found the scheme effective in improving language education at schools. However, they also highlighted the extent of NETs’ adaptation to the local educational system and cultural differences as factors that have hindered the impact of the scheme. Interestingly, Wong et al.'s findings were consistent with Trent's (2012) study on NETs who experienced challenges regarding their self-positionings as teaching professionals. NETs relied on external support for establishing pedagogical legitimacy against other local stakeholders who constantly problematized their instructional practices. As a result, they constructed discourses of antagonism to the educational system and institutional practices. As a professional group tasked with ‘advis[ing] colleagues on the current use of English and how it is shaped by culture’ (Education Bureau, 2024), NETs in Hong Kong schools require a closer investigation to understand how they negotiate their identities in classrooms, institutions and the city.
Teacher Questioning in Hong Kong and Identity-Oriented PD
Questions asked by teachers are vital to creating an engaging classroom discourse. Teacher questioning in Hong Kong has been seen as a problematic practice because language teachers there tend to adopt a transmissive pedagogy that relies heavily on questions demanding lower-order cognitive engagement rather than higher-order critical thinking (R Wong, 2010) and to promote a teacher-centered classroom discourse inhibiting students’ active participation (Lo and Macaro, 2012).
In our PD work, we focused on teacher questioning because previous research indicated that local academic cultures are important factors determining the quality of teacher questions in terms of their cognitive complexity (Hu and Duan, 2019) or interactional orientation (Teo, 2016). In this regard, NETs as transnational educators have crossed multiple geographical, cultural and linguistic borders to work as secondary school teachers in Hong Kong. Researching them could reveal the discursive construction of transnational teacher identity in relation to diverse cultural and academic backgrounds. With that in mind, we aimed to examine how NETs’ identity work and practices might be influenced during an identity-oriented PD program. In accordance with our conceptual framework and previous work on the pedagogizing of teacher identities, we utilized:
activities helping teachers reflect on and organize their experiences so that they would narrate them – accordingly, we upcycled stimulated recall protocols as pedagogy for teacher learning and employed narrative frames to support teachers’ narrative reflections and discursive construction of identities in relation to questioning practice in the classroom; and one-to-one mentoring to help teachers reflect critically on their questioning practices in light of their identity work.
With these activities and mentoring, we pedagogized identity and examined how the explicitly facilitated identity work influenced their professional learning. The stimulated recalls and narrative frames were not only data collection instruments for us but also reflective activities intended to get the teachers to construct professional discourses for identity formation. Through these activities, we made identity work more noticeable for the teachers so that they could draw connections between the content of the PD (i.e. teacher questioning) and their identity work.
Methods and Materials
We employed a comparative case study design, which is a multi-scalar framework that examines how structures are culturally produced. Such a design helps researchers compare multiple similarly-framed cases (e.g. teachers or schools) first horizontally based on their local practices and then vertically, examining the interaction of these local practices with policies and discourses (Bartlett and Vavrus, 2017). This approach worked well epistemologically with our intention of unveiling how two NETs made sense of their teacher questioning practices (horizontally) and how their practices were related to their identities, school policies and educational policies in Hong Kong (vertically). Furthermore, comparing the two cases would allow us to examine how our PD program supported (or failed to support) the teachers in building connections between the new professional knowledge (i.e. teacher questioning), their identity work and wider authoritative discourses.
Participants
The NETs who participated in this study were from a larger study involving a PD program on teacher questioning, which was conducted at secondary schools in Hong Kong during the 2022–2023 academic year. There were three NETs who participated in the program. All three were invited to participate, and two of them accepted the invitation.
Case 1: Nigel
Nigel (pseudonym), from the US, was a graduate student in a Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL)-related MA program at a local university. Under the NET scheme, he had been working for 13 years, five of which were at his current school. He was a monolingual White teacher. As an active member of his school's English panel, he had helped developing materials for the English classes and worked with his colleagues in several school-based PD sessions in which he shared his expertise. As an educator, he was invested in learning more about critical thinking in the classroom and how teacher questioning could promote higher-order cognitive processes in the classroom.
Case 2: Allen
Allen (pseudonym) was from a former colonial country 2 and fluent in both English and his mother tongue. He had been teaching English for 15 years in Hong Kong, including four years at his current school. His role as an English teacher at his school was unique because there were many multilingual students who shared the same ethnic background as his. He was invested in creating a safe space for his students from non-Chinese and Chinese backgrounds where they were able to learn from each other while developing their English proficiency. Thus, he organized out-of-class activities for his students. He was keen on teacher questioning because he wanted to learn more about how his use of questions could motivate his students to become more engaged in the classroom.
The PD Program
The PD program included school-based work and one-to-one mentoring. During the Spring semester of 2023, we offered the five-hour program to the NETs from different secondary schools in Hong Kong. The program was conducted with each NET individually and included a pre-observation conference, two lesson observations, a seminar, two narrative frame installments and a stimulated recall session. Figure 1 presents the program timeline.
Program Timeline.
Steps 2, 4 and 6 lasted approximately one hour each, whereas the narrative frames were take-home assignments. During the two-hour seminar, we introduced the theoretical foundations of productive teacher questioning in the English classroom, focusing on the cognitive demand of teacher questions (i.e. lower-order and higher-order questions) and interactional orientations (i.e. authoritative and dialogic classroom discourse). We also introduced different questioning approaches whereby teachers could make strategic and dynamic use of questions of different cognitive demands and interactional orientations to create learning-rich teacher–student interactions in the classroom. We did not count the semi-structured interviews in program hours since the primary objective of them was qualitative data collection.
Data Collection
Data came from two narrative frame installments, stimulated recall sessions and semi-structured interviews. The participants’ responses to the narrative frames allowed us to collect coherent stories, and the stimulated recalls helped us examine specific examples of the NETs’ questioning practices in the observed lessons. While creating the narrative frames (see Figure 2 for a sample), we drew on sample prompts and structure suggested by Barkhuizen (2014).
Narrative Frame Snippet.
We designed the stimulated recall sessions to help teachers make explicit connections between their actual questions and identity work. Accordingly, the protocols included transcriptions of teacher–student interactions from the lesson observations, and the teacher educator (the first author) worked with the teachers to review the interactions and their use of questions. He used these sessions to exemplify dimensions of teacher questioning (i.e. cognitive demand and interactional orientation) and questioning approaches.
Data Analysis
We employed thematic analysis to identify and examine themes emerging in our data. This analytical method aligned with our intention to explore how the identity-oriented PD program on teacher questioning impinged on the NETs’ identity work and professional learning. Table 1 demonstrates how the different phases of the thematic analysis worked out.
Sample Coding.
Following Braun and Clarke's (2022) procedure, we started by familiarizing ourselves with the data through transcription. We then passed through the data source to come up with initial codes. Subsequently, we reviewed and grouped the codes in search of salient themes. After reviewing the identified themes to ensure that they captured the coded extracts well, we named and defined the themes in view of our research questions. The inductive approach to theme identification allowed us, as both teacher educators and program developers, to keep our subjectivity at arm's length and stay close to the data (Braun and Clarke, 2022). Finally, we member-checked the coded data excerpts and the generated themes with our participants and received their confirmation.
Findings
Comparing the participants’ identity work during the PD program led us to three themes:
In what follows, we present these themes as they played out for each participant separately.
Nigel
Juxtaposition of Teacher Identities by Negotiating Roles
Throughout the program, Nigel made his identity positions explicit. He talked about his externally defined role regarding classroom discourse, more specifically, teacher questioning. For example, he highlighted his role as a language-use promoter:
So, I am circling back to my role here, which is basically to get students to use the language. That's the main thing. When I pose a question, I basically try to get them to say something. They don’t have that chance at home or many other subjects. (Interview)
Tensions Arising from Pedagogical Culture
Nigel reflected explicitly on the impact of pedagogical culture in Hong Kong on how he enacted himself as an NET in his teaching context, juxtaposing his actual and idealized practices. Specifically, he shared how the grammar-based and exam-oriented culture prevalent in Hong Kong schools contradicted his aspired identity.
I think I have shied away from asking critical thinking questions because a lot of my job is now to get students to use those grammar rules that the local colleagues are lecturing on. [Students] may not get much opportunity to have an English learning environment. (Interview)
Nigel's reflection on a classroom activity during the stimulated recall gave further evidence of the tensions of his preferred practice with the prevalent pedagogical culture and his actual teaching activities. He asked students to work in groups and discuss follow-up questions about a previous reading. Reflecting on his classroom talk in Excerpt 4, he realized that the questions that he prepared were dominated by lower-order ones focusing on factual knowledge and literal understanding rather than critical thinking and reading between or beyond the lines. Questions that promoted the latter would not work because that was not what the students were used to.
Even with this small group, that sort of questioning would not work in a context where students are not familiar with feeding off each other. Whereas in a Western context, I would get one student to say an idea, and I might ask why they say so. Then somebody else might go. This didn’t work here. It's quite often when I ask such questions, I end up having one-on-one interactions with a particular student and everybody else tunes out. (Stimulated recall)
Nigel was caught between what he thought everyone did in the Hong Kong context and what he was familiar with in the Western context. Although he was reluctant to give up the Western ways of teaching and interacting with students, his experiences in Hong Kong made him see that the old familiar practices would not work with his Hong Kong students, who were simply unfamiliar with dialogic teaching, where students would ‘feed off each other’ and build upon each other's authentic ideas and thinking. Nigel's strategy for dealing with the tensions experienced was to ‘shy away’ from the old familiar ways of doing things in response to the dominant pedagogical and cultural discourses in Hong Kong.
Emotion Labor for Being an NET
Nigel would like to promote an environment of English not only because of his duty as an NET but also due to his teaching philosophy and aspired identity. This goal was also consistent with his roles and responsibilities as an NET, that is, ‘to provide an authentic environment for children to learn English’ and ‘to develop children's interest in learning English and establish the foundation for life-long learning’ (Education Bureau, 2024). However, in actual practice, he was compelled to prepare his charges for high-stakes standardized exams. To ensure their exam success, he had to give up dialogic classroom discourse for monologic teaching, which was ‘frustrating’ and emotionally taxing for him. The following excerpt captures the metaphorical description of his impasse, likening an NET teacher to a dentist.
The students aren’t used to that kind of learning. So, like … as I’m sure you've seen, I asked a question, silence, nothing, and then I asked it again, still nothing. I am just like other NET teachers. We call it pulling teeth. So, in class you’re like pulling teeth from the students, trying to get something from them. I am more of a dentist than a teacher in this role. (Stimulated recall)
In Excerpt 5, Nigel reflected on a particular classroom interaction and described his emotional labor by highlighting his feeling of strandedness due to a lack of alignment between the Education Bureau’s expectations of him as a NET (i.e. his NET role), his classroom practices and his aspired identity. In the program, Nigel was introduced to strategies for productive teacher questioning, and one strategy that he was keen on learning more about was alternating the cognitive demands of teacher questions. That is, a teacher can use a lower-order question to scaffold students’ thinking when their initial higher-order question fails to elicit a response. In his second narrative frame (Excerpt 6) following the introduction of the questioning strategy, he shared a relevant classroom experience.
Nigel implemented the questioning strategy with a positive outcome, leading to a feeling of reassurance and an awareness of the need to pinpoint the causes of student silence and act accordingly. This incident demonstrated that it was possible to resolve some of the tensions between his identity, roles and the prevailing classroom culture through mediating resources, instead of building up an antagonistic discourse. It also confirmed teaching as a process laden with emotions, be they positive or negative. Nigel needed reassurance about his practice. In this regard, PD could facilitate reflexivity and strengthen the nexus between teaching practice and teacher learning. Encouragingly, Nigel was able to leverage the program activities to make his roles/tensions/emotions explicit to himself and create a reflexive relationship between them and his professional identity.
Allen
Juxtaposition of Teacher Identities by Negotiating Roles
Allen's niche as an NET teacher was his multicultural and multilingual background and the unique relationship with the non-Chinese student community at his school. As an NET sharing the same linguacultural background as his students, he positioned himself as a guide who would make sure that those students learn in a safe environment, as evident in Excerpt 7.
When a [minority] student gives the wrong answer, my first thought is normally not to embarrass the student, because if I embarrass those ones, they will be very reluctant in the future. So, my first thought, normally, if they are giving a wrong answer, normally, I say it's a good point, but let's go back to the question again. (Stimulated recall)
Tensions Arising from Pedagogical Culture
In the interview (Excerpt 8), Allen compared his questioning practice with local (Chinese) and non-local students. He realized that his questions for local students contributed to a teacher-centered and authoritative discourse, though he aspired to promote dialogic teaching and tried to do so in his non-Chinese classes.
Basically, the system over here doesn’t encourage you to ask questions. For example, in the non-Chinese classes, I take a little bit of liberty, and then I ask questions, and I let them discuss among ourselves. But in the local classes, if you ask them questions, you normally don’t get answers, or they are short answers. If you ask them to copy something, that's the safe thing to do. (Interview)
In Excerpt 9, Allen recognized the influence of the culturally and linguistically diverse background of his students and Hong Kong itself. He observed that his students’ linguacultural diversity changed not only his choice of learning materials but also his ‘language instruction’ and ‘language in the class’, demonstrating how he connected his previous understanding of differentiated instruction with teacher questioning. Mindful of the complex ethnolinguistic backgrounds of his students, he was ‘always careful about religion and culture-related discussions because some students from certain backgrounds might feel uncomfortable’ (Narrative frame 2). Furthermore, the cultural backgrounds of his immigrant students created professional tensions related to his role of providing not only linguistic support but also ‘pastoral care’ (Narrative frame 1).
Emotion Labor for Being an NET
Allen's
For me, it is frightening that the students I’m trying to teach come to school because they just have to come to school, for the sake of coming to school. (Interview)
His emotion labor also came through in his responses to the narrative frames. He confided that he sometimes felt ‘really frustrated because some classes may consist of students with different learning habits due to their background’ (Narrative frame 2). He explained that this diversity could also be frustrating because the students were expected to reach certain standards by the school but the linguacultural diversity of his students meant that some of them could not achieve the expected standards (Narrative frame 1). He believed that possible solutions to the problem may lie in the use of ‘differentiated materials’ (Narrative frame 2) as well as learning to differentiate his classroom discourse in a way that would help him navigate his school's linguacultural diversity.
Discussion and Conclusion
To address our first research question, we examined an identity-oriented PD program for in-service NETs in Hong Kong. Our study demonstrated that the NETs benefitted from the pedagogizing of identity work because it allowed them to create professional discourses of their own about a particular teaching practice (i.e. questioning) and draw connections between their individual discourses and macro discourses (i.e. school practices, policy frameworks or pedagogical culture). This reflexive process helped them interrelate their roles and actual practices. With respect to our second research question, we observed that the teachers responded to the identity-oriented activities by negotiating their professional roles, tensions and emotions regarding their teacher questioning practice.
Our findings demonstrated the NETs’ growing awareness of their classroom language (Coffey, 2015). Analyzing their identity work vertically in relation to the macro discourses, including the teacher roles assigned by school principals (for Nigel), school culture (for Allen) and government policy (i.e. the NET scheme), revealed that the NETs drew on ideological discourses (Aneja, 2016) and built their own professional discourses in response to the macro ones (Sanchez-Martin, 2022; Yazan, 2019). On the other hand, the identity-oriented PD program helped them negotiate their teacher roles according to their aspired and defined roles while learning about teacher questioning. Therefore, our PD approach was not digressive but helped the NETs create reflexive relationships between their identity work and the professional knowledge-base, a central concern of most in-service PD activities (Noonan, 2019). We argue that such reflexive relationships enabled the NETs to discover their agency, as in Nigel's case when he attempted to infuse his practice into the exam format without letting the standardized examination hijack his teaching. In a similar vein, Allen's agency was at work when he tried to find ways to build a classroom where the learning materials and the classroom discourse were culturally sensitive, in alignment with the teacher identities he aspired to, but not necessarily the roles that the NET scheme projected upon him.
Our findings were in line with Trent's (2012) finding that NETs in Hong Kong may resort to antagonization in their professional discourses, especially when their academic background and the local culture diverge. This antagonism may result in self-marginalization (e.g.
Our study revealed that being an NET involved emotion labor. This emotion labor could manifest itself as negative emotions, such as frustration or fear arising from the incongruence of expectations from personal beliefs, policy stipulations and time-honored pedagogical culture. It could also involve positive emotions; for example, reassurance. Our findings support Derakhshan et al.'s (2024) contention that when roles outlined by policy discourse are not directly related to teachers’ identity work, the policy can impose emotion labor on them. Even though the current study drew on data collected from only two NETs, there was clear evidence that NETs in Hong Kong can experience hindering emotions that are structurally related to macro-level policy discourses and meso-level institutional practices, pointing to the ecological embeddedness of teacher emotions (Benesch, 2017). Therefore, we echo Wong et al.'s (2018) report and call for identity-oriented PD programs that can support NETs’ acculturation and integration into the Hong Kong context.
Our study has provided some new empirical support for the importance of pedagogizing identity in the professional learning of in-service NETs in Hong Kong. It is essential for the Education Bureau of Hong Kong SAR to work with teacher educators to develop PD initiatives for NETs that pedagogize teacher identity and facilitate their negotiation of complex and intersecting professional identities. As Noonan (2019) points out, greater personalization of PD with identity-oriented programs is critical to ensuring teachers’ continued growth and development.
Footnotes
Funding
ORCID iDs
