Language Teacher Identity research has emerged as a focus of attention in the context of Second Language Teacher Education programs, given the consideration of the relevance of initial processes of teacher identity formation in the Continuing Professional Development (CPD) of student teachers. In this sense, research about Language Teacher Identity is necessary to “rethink language teacher education in identity terms" (Donato, 2017, p.29-30). The analysis of how language teacher identity is developed through and influenced by specific content and practices of teacher education courses (Richards, 2017; Yazan & Lindahl, 2020) allows to understand how student teachers develop themselves professionally, and increasingly become teachers. Additionally, in our globalized world, student teachers from different cultures of learning participate in classroom practices and teacher education programmes, becoming transnational communities of practice (Guo & Lei, 2019). This new contextual reality shapes the nature of the identities that they bring into it, creating new identity issues for student teachers.

As a key issue in Teacher Education and for CPD, Language Teacher Identity is shaped through different actions. One of them is Reflective Practice, an activity that facilitates that student teachers become aware of their own professional identities. Considered as "a key component associated with unlocking this tacit understanding of the self, so that teachers can become more aware of who they are professionally" (Farrell, 2017, p.184), reflective practice constitutes a tool for professional learning. Student teachers engage reflection in teacher education classroom in order to understand a new professional reality as well as to develop their own professional identity. Consequently, through these reflective actions, student teacher identities surface at the level of awareness and become useful for their own CPD: student teachers acquire consciousness about what they are and what they are becoming as teachers. These actions can be carried out through different activities, as portfolios or think aloud processes, including dialogic and collaborative forms of peer reflection. These actions play a relevant role in the development of Reflective Practice oriented to construct and develop professional identity (Mann & Walsh, 2017; Farr, Farrell & Riordan, 2019). Interactional Reflective Practice, on that way, reflects the need to understand CPD from a data-led approach, that is increasingly becoming the focus of research attention. However, no studies have so far approached Reflective Practice interactions in transnational communities of practice, so it’s worth to take it into consideration as a field of research.

Taking into account the need to deeply understand how reflective practice is developed in interaction, this study has the aim to explore student language teacher identities in transnational peer reflection interactions. More specifically, we seek to understand how and why language teacher identity of pre-service teachers is expressed and represented in transnational peer reflection interactions. For this purpose, we are going to firstly identify the linguistic features that pre-service teachers use to display their language teacher identities in peer reflection interactions. Secondly, we will establish how and why language teacher identities are unfolded in connection with the linguistic features expressed and the ongoing interaction.

The data of this study were collected from proPIC Europa, an Erasmus + KA2 transnational collaborative project with the aim to promote reflective practice for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) in pre-service language teacher education. The purpose of the project was to foster international collaboration between second language student teachers from different academic and teaching backgrounds. More specifically, data were collected during a study week at the University of Barcelona in May 2019. Participants are 12 students teachers (ages ranging from 20 to 44) coming from four different teacher education backgrounds (University of Karlsruhe, University of Newcastle, University of Borås and University of Kiel) who want to be Second Language Teachers. The participants of the project engaged different reflective activities, such as face-to-face discussions or the elaboration of e-portfolios. The corpus is constituted by a total amount of 13 video-recorded interactions with a total length of 3 hours and 49 minutes developed through different peer reflective semi-structured discussions, such as discussing teachers’ beliefs represented in images or reflecting after a lesson observation. The analysis primarily draw on Corpus Linguistics-Conversation Analysis (CL/CA) as an approach to understanding teacher professional identity (Walsh, Morton y O’ Keeffe, 2011). This approach allows to take into account not only the range of linguistic features used by the Student Teachers in interaction but also to go into the interactions to understand what, in that way and why student teachers identity is unfolded. For that, first of all, we are going to transcribe the interactions following the common conventions for Conversation Analysis (Jefferson 2004, Hepburn & Bolden 2017). Secondly, we are going to analyse the interactions from a Corpus Linguistics perspective, using the ANTCONC program. This analysis will allow us the frequency of the linguistic features used by the Student Teachers and the components related with this features that constitute the emergency of their teacher identities. After that, transcriptions will be analysed following a Conversation Analysis perspective to deeply understand the relationship between the emergence of teachers identity and the interaction in which it is unfolded.

The data analysis shows a prominent usage of personal pronouns in occurrence with certain verbs as linguistic features of Language Teacher Identity. Specifically, 65 cases of the pronoun ‘I’ have been found, while the pronoun ‘we’ has been less prominent (n=18). On the other side, pronouns as ‘you’,‘your’ or 'they' are also linguistic features related with the emergence of Student Teacher Identities. Most of the Language Student Teacher Identity issues emerged in relation with expressions of their language background and proficiency. In particular, identity concerns regarding their condition of no-native speaker teacher have been identified. Context related identity, that refers to expressions of identity in relation to conditions created by the teaching contexts where they develop their practice (Pennington & Richards, 2016) are also found. The emergence of this teacher identity is linked to their national backgrounds and school cultures. Regarding the emergence of teacher identity in interaction, we see that participants talk about their teacher identity mainly with a descriptive and evaluative function. These actions are carried out to align or misalign with the epistemic position of the speaker, showing agreement or disagreement about what has been said. Teacher Identity development in interaction, therefore, emerges as a reaction, looking for epistemic congruences or incongruences. The paper presentation will finish addressing the following questions to the audience: Which are the implications for teacher education practices, content and activities? Which are possible approaches to foster reflective practice oriented to facilitate the exploration of Language Teacher Identity of student teachers? Which are possible manners to foster peer reflection in order to engage student teachers in a process of Language Teacher Identity construction?

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