How teachers begin to shift: a disjuncture-driven mechanism of early-stage identity repositioning toward Global Englishes in Asia

Teachers across Asia navigate multilingual classrooms while holding expectations shaped by standard-norm EFL models. This qualitative, exploratory study presents an early-stage mechanism that explains how teachers’ professional stance begins to shift when those expectations encounter local English diversity. Drawing on reflective accounts, critical incidents, and a Global Englishes-oriented analysis of teachers’ and pre-service teachers’ materials, the study examines how participants interpret communicative events that conflict with prior assumptions. Findings reveal four interrelated movements: disjuncture triggered by unfamiliar accents, translanguaging, or locally influenced pronunciation; critical interrogation of those disruptions; early identity repositioning; and initial pedagogical agency, including intentions to broaden listening input and foreground intelligibility over accuracy. Together, these movements constitute the Critical Disjunctural Reflective Pedagogy (CDRP) model, a conceptual framework that explains how disruption, interpretation, identity shifts, and agency interact at the onset of teacher development, offering a principled basis for Global Englishes-oriented teacher education.