Individually heroic or ecologically supported: implementation profiles among teachers of less commonly taught languages in China’s micro-departments

Within language-in-education policy, competency-based curriculum standards increasingly require teachers to translate multilingual goals into more specific classroom practices and forms of evidence. For teachers of less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) – German, French, and Spanish – such expectations are often addressed in structurally isolated, resource-thin micro-departments with limited subject-specific infrastructure. Yet quantitative evidence on how these teachers implement new standards remains limited, and teachers’ own accounts of feasibility constraints are rarely integrated into profile-based research. This study adopted a person-centred approach to examine early-stage standards implementation among 98 secondary-school LCTL teachers in China. Exploratory cluster analysis identified two implementation profiles differing consistently across contextual, cognitive, and motivational-professional dimensions, with no clear association between profile membership and background characteristics. Qualitative analysis of anonymised written reflections from an online Community of Practice identified three cross-cutting themes: a standards-to-practice translation bottleneck, learner-readiness constraints, and thin implementation support. The findings suggest that standards-aligned language provision in LCTL micro-departments depends less on individual effort alone than on interpretive, design, and professional infrastructures that make implementation workable. The study offers implications for language curriculum organisation and infrastructure-building in structurally small language departments.