This paper reports on a four-year longitudinal case study of four Chinese EFL teachers on their professional identity change in the first years of teaching in K-12 schools in China. Teachers' cue-based and exemplar-based imagined identities formed in the pre-service stage transformed into rule-based and schema-based practiced identities in the novice stage, mediated by the mixed influences of the institutional contexts of school and the dynamic educational contexts. (Contains 1 table.)