This article offers an account from a preservice teacher of a 5‐year double bachelor's degree programme seeking certification for teaching English as a second language (ESL) in Hong Kong. Crystal charts her capstone experience of conducting classroom‐based writing research into one of the family of story genres—narrative—under the guidance of Choi. Her Grade 9 ESL learners were instructed to produce a written response to a prompt from the wizardry world of Harry Potter. This pedagogical intervention was motivated by a desire to scaffold the writing of ESL learners, with the longer term goal of their developing the necessary knowledge and skills required for high‐stakes examinations. The article reviews the challenges of ESL writing instruction and considers using genre pedagogy to scaffold ESL learners, moving them towards the goal of becoming builders of effective and creative narratives. The pedagogical concerns were tackled through a focus‐group interview with ESL learners, as well as the collection of evidence from selected writing samples. The article concludes that explicit writing instruction through teacher modelling and creative imitation can be an enabling and liberating experience for still‐developing ESL learners.

Changing teachers' perceptions about the value of technology and equipping them with appropriate knowledge and skills in pedagogical use of technology is often regarded as a key determinant of success in technology infusion in schools. However, recent studies have indicated that changing teachers' epistemological beliefs about the use of technology in teaching and learning may not necessarily bring about change in their practice, and that technology implementation in schools can be affected by other instrumental forces, such as collegial trust, support for risk taking and access to expertise within an organization. In this article, we delineate collegial trust, access to expertise, willingness to take risks, etc. as manifestations of social capital in an organization. We argue that social capital plays a pivotal role in leveraging pedagogical change in schools. To gauge teachers' self-perceived change in their pedagogical use of technology, we take a constructivist perspective to explore how technology serves as a tool for facilitating students to articulate their thoughts, to explore and construct knowledge, and to become more autonomous in learning. The results of our questionnaire survey indicate that (1) the social capital of a school had a strong direct effect on teachers' self-perceived changes in their pedagogical use of technology, and that the effect of social capital on pedagogical change outweighed that of teachers' perceived effectiveness of professional development; (2) teachers' receptivity towards technology use had a direct effect on their perceived effectiveness of professional development but a very weak effect on fostering changes in their pedagogical use of technology; and (3) the social capital of a school had a direct influence on teachers' receptivity towards technology use and their perceived effectiveness of professional development. To further unfold the complexity of technology implementation, more in-depth qualitative studies on how social forces shape the change process are deemed necessary.

This article is based on the principle that teacher development is a life-long process when seeking to develop professional competencies. With the changing views of teacher education as background, the benefits to teachers associated with practice-oriented knowledge are predicated on a measure of empowerment through narration, self-expression and reflection. A life-story may represent the outward articulation of a teacher's inner scrutiny, and demonstrate the 'we-experience' of a professional learning community arising out of its social structures and processes. Using autobiography as pedagogy, the article focuses on what a particular teacher's narrative is expressing, how it is demonstrating that belief or life value, and why this process is worthwhile for professional learning. Such an autobiographical approach to 'learning to teach' is itself one response challenging the traditional theories of teacher knowledge within the theory-practice dichotomy.

This article is concerned with examining how social class as a key aspect of learner identity is modified, reinforced or transformed through educational progressions, whereupon relationships change, power is redistributed and different forms of capital are prized. The dynamics between structural and cultural influences on working-class relationships to education are explored by way of autobiographical writing, and analysed through the lens of habitus and field. In operationalising habitus, the indeterminacy of the concept rejects a close, unproblematic connection between class and education, questions the assumed homogeneity of class dispositions, and renders a more fluid and dynamic working of class and learner identity. Arguing against the synchronic view of language characterised by regularity and internal consistency, this methodological orientation of habitus chimes with a textual approach that values inferential enrichment and indeterminacy. Using critical discourse in genre analysis offers space for potentially subversive interpretations, or for playing with evaluative meanings, of an autobiographical account rooted in the local and particular, but also sets great store in understanding constraining and transformative courses of action. This modest inquiry illuminates the relevance of autobiographical reflection to the development of agency and educational capital, with an emphasis on temporality, continuity and change.

Language is a multiplicity of meaning-making systems, which are connected with social, cultural and psychological networks. Focusing on issues of power, this article is concerned to explore how the readings of a European folktale triggered attempts among teenage girls in Hong Kong to make their own feminist and subversive interpretations in English. The reconstructed stories are more than a partial reproduction of the conventional text, they are also a useful reflection of the teenage girls' literacy and gender experience, as well as of their generic and social knowledge. With a resistance to textual conventions, the teenage girls demonstrate their written competence to create alternative subject and reading positions, which are textually motivated by their sense of difference. The material realisation of the stories is also characterised by splits and instabilities, in the negotiation of a new boundary for femininity. This negotiation demonstrates how the teenage girls are on the move, facing and settling contradictory possibilities in acquiring literacy and social roles. Along these lines of observation, the synchronic view of language, characterised by regularity and internal consistency, needs to be challenged in second-language writing instruction.