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“It’s Putonghua-accented English”: Language ideologies of Mainland Chinese English teachers in Hong Kong
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DOI：10.1016/j.system.2026.104082.png)
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Abstract
En 中文
With Hong Kong’s increasing integration with Chinese Mainland and a shortage of qualified English teachers, English teachers from Mainland have become an expanding presence in the region’s English teaching profession. Yet their experiences remain insufficiently explored. Guided by a narrative inquiry design with an integrative framework of language teacher identity (LTI), this study explores how 37 English teachers from Chinese Mainland constructed their LTI in relation to language ideologies surrounding English, Cantonese, and Putonghua in their teaching contexts in Hong Kong. Data bodies were collected through narrative frames with the participants and in-depth interviews with 12 of them. Analysis through iterative coding revealed that English and Cantonese, ideally embodied through native proficiency, were tied to professionalism and insiderness in participants’ LTI, whereas Putonghua, indexed to a Mainland Chinese identity, was often constructed as a marker of otherness. These findings point to a hierarchical linguistic ideology that implicitly sustains native-speakerism and linguistic essentialism within Hong Kong’s English language teaching profession. On this basis, we argue that institutional and professional efforts are needed to raise critical awareness of such underlying language ideologies, empowering teachers to construct more agentive and reflexive LTI that challenge, rather than reproduce, existing linguistic hierarchies.
Keywords:
language teacher identity
language ideologies
native English teachers
Mainland Chinese teachers in Hong Kong
English language education in Hong Kong
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