Dr. Svetlana Chigaeva-Heddad

Being on the peripheries: English language teaching in self-financed tertiary institutions  

English language teachers in Hong Kong’s self-financed institutions may often find themselves on the peripheries of multiple communities, including the more scholarly community of their counterparts from across government-supported universities and the more legitimised communities of academic staff from degree-awarding programmes within their institutions. In this talk, I will focus on the various initiatives we have had at the Technological and Higher Education Institute of Hong Kong to negotiate a more central, legitimised role for English language teachers. These initiatives include (1) organising internal and Institute-wide sharing of theory-informed good practices, for example with respect to integrating continuous feedback, developing teaching materials, and designing gen AI literacy development programmes, (2) leading annual international teacher development symposia, and (3) collaborating with language teaching professionals from other self-financed institutions. I believe these initiatives have helped us to address, to some extent, the theory-practice dualism in English language teaching but they go beyond that. They have also helped us to understand the challenges of the teaching-practice-research-sustainability nexus that characterises industry-focused self-financed institutions.