The outbreak of COVID-19 witnesses a sudden surge of fully online classes globally. Scholarly attention has promptly shifted to explore the personal experiences and perceived challenges of students and teachers. For English as a Foreign Language (EFL) instructors around the world, many are required to teach online for the first time, yet studies on their teacher identity development in online teaching contexts remain limited. To address this gap, the researchers conducted a case study of three EFL instructors in a Chinese university within an online semester to understand how their online teacher identities developed and shifted. The concepts of ‘imagined and practiced identity’ and social representation theory have been adopted as the conceptual framework. The findings revealed the trajectories of three online EFL instructors as their imagined identities evolved and renegotiated into their practiced ones based on individual and contextual factors. The findings reveal a lack of rule-based identities from the participants and highlight the need for pedagogical and psychological support for EFL teachers when they transition to an online context. Recommendations are made accordingly.
English-medium Instruction (EMI), that is, the use of the English language to teach academic subjects apart from English, is a growing phenomenon around the world. In view of the facilitative role of language in content learning, scholars have stressed the need to incorporate a language focus into EMI classrooms. One practical question that arises from this discussion is “How?” This study, through a telling case, intends to reveal the classroom practices of an EMI teacher who explicitly addresses different language issues during her content teaching in a psychology course in a Macau university. Drawing on multiple sources of data including field observations and interviews, the authors unearth three forms of the teacher’s language-related teaching practices – (1) teaching language for content comprehension, (2) teaching language for classroom engagement, and (3) teaching language through feedback. Specific teaching techniques are further identified and discussed in relation to various personal and contextual factors surrounding the EMI classroom. Practical insights are offered to individual EMI teachers in embracing a language focus to facilitate content learning in EMI programs across geographical contexts.
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