This study explores pedagogical change and implementation of an expert English language teacher in a graduate course to facilitate students’ all-round development at a Chinese university. An analysis of the data collected from interviews, metaphor, classroom observation, and netnographic observation reveals that the participant proactively adapted his pedagogy to practical realities of the particular classroom to achieve best learning outcome on the part of students. The participant enacted his agency in different professional tasks to make himself a competent clinical kind of teacher who can combine his personal, practical knowledge with technological pedagogical content knowledge, and tactically apply it to a complex dynamic classroom, and who endows students with autonomy and offers them appropriate hedging to help them display their abilities to the fullest extent. The findings of this case study may contribute not only to teachers’ professional development but also to the study of English language teaching pedagogy.
 

ELT pedagogy; expert teacher; teacher agency; professional development; sociocultural theory