Professional identity calibration through self-authored practices: Pre-service language teachers’ racialization and ethnicization work towards legitimacy

As language teacher education becomes increasingly shaped by linguistic, racial, and ethnic diversity, understanding how pre-service teachers negotiate professional legitimacy has become an important concern in applied linguistics and teacher education research. This article examines how raciolinguistic and ethnic ideologies shape pre-service language teachers’ professional identity development in a German teacher education program. Drawing on discourse-analytic readings of in-depth interviews with two pre-service teachers of English and Spanish, we propose a heuristic—ideology → identity work → felt consequences—to trace how native-speakerism, raciolinguistic expectations, and ethnic ideologies are taken up in self-narratives. The analysis identifies four forms of everyday identity work: approximating an imagined native speaker through accent, phenotype, and origin stories; managing a racialized gaze that produces both hypervisibility and affinity; authorizing oneself against anticipated doubt and discrimination; and de-ethnizing by downplaying ethnic markers to claim “European/Western” belonging. These practices reveal how legitimacy is calibrated to language-specific authenticity demands, with the same body read differently across English and Spanish. We argue that raciolinguistic regulation operates not only through institutional gatekeeping but also through self-authored practices of self-(de)racialization and de-ethnization that entail both opportunities and costs. Conceptually, we extend language teacher identity scholarship by centering ethnicity as an ideological site alongside race and language. Practically, we suggest interventions that name and disrupt ideologies while validating diverse linguistic and ethnic trajectories in contemporary European teacher education.