Abstract
This article examines the professional 'becoming' of emerging teachers of languages (ELT) in Australia through a phenomenological, narrative inquiry. Drawing on ten interviews with teacher education students and early-career teachers, the study explored how identities are negotiated across school placements, policy contexts and mentoring relationships. Kumaravadivelu's (2012) KARDS model (Knowing, Analysing, Recognising, Doing, Seeing) is used as the conceptual frame to map moments of growth, blockage and reframing. The analysis highlights the constraints and affordances experienced by teacher education students through two representative narratives that reflect on supervised and early career professional experience. Through a KARDS-referenced developmental lens, the stories are understood in terms of 'what teachers have to basically do in order to become self-determining and self-transforming' teachers (Kumaravadivelu, 2012, p. 17). Implications for teacher education point to the value of embedding KARDS-aligned reflective tools throughout initial and ongoing preparation, situating plurilingual and intercultural identities as foundational to language-teaching practice, and providing more structured support for mentors, whose guidance is critical in shaping beginning teachers' professional becoming. This article contends that KARDS as a curriculum for language teacher education would contribute to developing a sustainable languages teacher workforce, where teacher education supports who teachers are becoming as much as what they need to know and do.