When Professional Development Fails: EFL Academics Becoming Researchers Under Conditions of Institutional Stratification in Chinese Higher Education

ABSTRACT Professional development is widely promoted as a strategy for enhancing the research capacity of EFL academics in higher education. However, existing research has paid less attention to the disciplinary knowledge and research practices through which research competence is developed. This study examines professional learning under conditions of institutional stratification in Chinese higher education. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 12 Chinese EFL academics from two universities, the study uses Bernstein's concepts of recognition rules, realisation rules, and recontextualisation to examine how access to research knowledge varies across institutional contexts. The findings show that doctoral education provides sustained access to research practice through supervision, feedback, and participation in disciplinary communities. It also provides access to powerful knowledge, including the specialised principles that underpin the production and evaluation of research. By contrast, institutional training offers more limited access through weak recontextualisation, while self‐directed learning often functions as a compensatory strategy. The study reconceptualises professional development as a form of differential epistemic access. It shows that institutional stratification can produce unequal research development through differences in access to doctoral education, mentoring, and other pedagogic conditions for learning disciplinary knowledge and participating in knowledge production.