Voices of the ‘second best’: exploring English-as-an-Additional-Language (EAL) student teachers’ identities and investment in self-financed English-medium teacher education in Hong Kong

English-medium instruction (EMI) is prevalent in Hong Kong's higher education sector, with both public and private universities offering programmes taught entirely in English. While EMI is often seen as enhancing internationalisation and competitiveness, previous research on EMI higher education has predominantly focused on academically higher-achieving students from prestigious research universities, leaving the experiences of those in self-financed institutions underexplored. This study addresses this gap by examining the experiences of students enrolled in an EMI teacher education programme at a private university in Hong Kong, focusing on their identities and investment as EMI learners navigating institutional hierarchies and linguistic challenges. The findings suggest that (1) EAL students’ investment in EMI is shaping and being shaped by cultural capital of metacognition about language and content learning; and (2) although discourses of English supremacy initially propelled some EAL students’ investment in EMI, the prevailing ideologies about language, knowledge production and self-financed higher education have circumscribed EMI’s affordances for their future development. The study thus proposes a critical content-and-language-integrated-learning approach to EMI in which alternative discourses of cultural and epistemic justice are enacted. Implications for other EMI higher education stakeholders in EAL regions are also discussed.