Dr Esther Tong graduated as a first-class-honour student from City University of Hong Kong where she was awarded a Bachelor of Arts in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) - a platform which paved the way for the development of her calling as a language educator. Determined to devote herself to the language education profession, she further pursued studies at University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, where she received a Diploma in Education with specialisation in TESL (with distinction), and a Master of Arts in English Education (with distinction). She then obtained her Doctor of Education in English Language Education from The University of Hong Kong.

Since joining CPCE in August 2002, Dr Tong has been responsible for teaching and developing Academic English and Workplace Communication subjects. She has taken on a number of academic leadership roles coordinating the English subject delivery and development as well as overseeing the programmes under Associate Degree Scheme in Humanities and Communication. Currently, she is the Division Head of the Division of Languages and Communication and the Director of the CPCE Centre for Pedagogic Research.

Having a sustained commitment to teaching excellence and innovation, she received the HKCC's Outstanding Teaching Award in 2004 and 2007, and several other teaching awards in 2005-2019, namely Lively Teaching Award, Inspiring Teaching Award and Caring Teacher Award. She is also the recipient of the CPCE Outstanding Teaching Performance/Achievement Award 2014/15, the CPCE Dean's Award for Outstanding Teaching Performance/Achievement 2014/15, and the FSTE General Education (GE) Outstanding Teaching Award 2017.

Dr Tong was the principal investigator of a SCOLAR-funded project about an adjunct English-across-the-curriculum instructional model. Her research interests lie in the areas of bilingual education, multimodal pedagogy, English across the curriculum, content and language integrated learning (CLIL), and applied linguistics.