“Day school teachers do not talk about this, right?”: Staging the “meta-teacher” in shadow education in Hong Kong

This thesis examines the expertise of private tutors in Hong Kong’s shadow education industry. It analyses a 17-episode YouTube tutoring competition. Orienting to critical discourse studies, it develops a toolkit comprising critical interactional sociolinguistics and metapragmatic analysis. The research also draws on the author’s professional engagement with shadow education. Findings show that tutors’ expertise is performance-driven: they embody affectivity and efficiency, enact roles that demonstrate superiority, and treat entertainment as a professional obligation. Tutors’ expertise is interpreted in relation to the marketisation of education and the proliferation of high-stakes testing.