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Blended classroom assessment (CA) has become commonplace in the post-pandemic era, offering advantages but also presenting challenges for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers. These challenges can impact teachers' emotional experiences, distinct from face-to-face or purely online environments. However, scant research exists on how EFL teachers employ emotion regulation (ER) strategies in blended CA within EFL contexts. This qualitative study examines how eight EFL teachers at a university in southwestern China employed ER strategies in blended CA. Drawing on Gross's ER theory, the study identifies ten intrinsic and extrinsic ER strategies, either antecedent-focused or response-focused, utilized by EFL teachers. These strategies helped teachers maintain resilience amidst challenges posed by blended CA, including low completion rates of online learning tasks prior to face-to-face instruction, interaction in blended CA, blended assessment design, managing the workload of blending online and face-to-face assessment, and addressing issues of plagiarism and cheating. The study enriches our understanding of EFL teachers' emotions in blended CA and underscores the significance of ER competence in assessment literacy. Implications for equipping teachers with strategies to enhance their emotional well-being and resilience in blended CA are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Textbooks are the primary materials for teaching in the Greater China Region, including the teaching of Chinese as a second language. This qualitative study examined how two teachers of first to fifth grade students in an international school in Macao selected, used, and adapted textbooks to teach Chinese to non-native Chinese speakers. It also examined the beliefs that drove teachers' decisions and actions. Multiple forms of evidence were analyzed, including responses to interview questions posed at multiple points, responses to a questionnaire administered at the beginning of the study, school documents, and content analyses of lessons in the selected textbook series and materials teachers made to accompany textbook lessons. The two teachers in this study made a conscious decision to continue using two textbook series selected by others and used the year before. The selection and use of these textbooks were underpinned by a set of interrelated beliefs, including their views on effective instruction (e.g., clearly presented topic, appealing and motivating materials, effective learning activities, focus on Chinese culture); their students' needs and motivations; their own teaching capabilities and attitudes; their epistemological beliefs about learning and knowledge; and the importance of local, national, and international standards and assessments. The two teachers devoted considerable effort to adapting the textbooks by developing their own materials that added, reduced, deleted, restructured, replaced, and re-ordered textbook learning activities. These adaptations were driven by specific teacher beliefs (e.g., the need for more meaning focused activities). Recommendations for future research and implications for teaching are offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Language socialization plays an important role in the process of language teacher identity formation. • Language socialization manifests in specific ways in teacher-student communicative interactions. • Pre-service L2 teachers are socialized into language teacher identity through teacher educators' expectations. • A clearer understanding of language socialization provides fresh insights for future research on language teacher identity formation. Language teacher identity formation has long captured researchers' attention in second/foreign language (L2) teacher education, and nowadays it has been increasingly viewed as a process of socialization. However, much remains unexplored about this socialization process, especially how language socialization impacts L2 teachers' professional growth. To bridge this gap, this ethnographic study was conducted in a Chinese culture class, aiming to uncover mechanisms of language socialization manifested in the communicative interactions between pre-service English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) teachers and their teacher educator. Results based on qualitative data analyses demonstrated three key mechanisms through which pre-service teachers' language teacher identity was shaped through their language experience in the classroom. These findings indicate the importance of investigating the influence of language socialization on L2 teachers' learning experience. Future research directions are also discussed to further the field's understanding of the nature, processes, and outcomes of socialization in language teacher identity formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) and native English-speaking teachers (NESTs) tends to focus on their respective strengths, the main strengths of NNESTs being their experience of learning English as a second language and their familiarity with their students’ language and educational background. This article proposes a further distinction between NNESTs who are local to their teaching settings, and ‘non-local NNESTS’, who are at risk of falling between the cracks of the NNEST–NEST distinction if they do not share their students’ first language and educational background. It also argues that the strengths of NNESTs and NESTs (local or non-local) are not intrinsic to these categories, but instead serve as contexts of discourse in which teachers construct their ‘authority’ to teach English in particular settings. A case study of two non-local NNESTs in their final year of a pre-service teacher education degree in Hong Kong explores how they struggled to construct authoritative identities as English teachers in the context of discourses that primarily validate the status of NESTs and local NNESTs. It concludes by calling for a more nuanced view of the NNEST–NEST distinction and for further fine-grained studies of the experiences of local and non-local NNESTs elsewhere in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]