"There's too much to explain": On being a bilingual pre-service teacher in a monolingual teacher education institution

This article is derived from a study which followed a group of bilingual and multilingual pre-service mainstream primary teachers over three years of their enrolment at an Australian university to investigate their perspectives and experiences related to their linguistic skills and the relationship of these to their English-medium course. By providing a platform for the voice of one study participant, Seo-yun (pseudonym), a bilingual Korean-Australian, to be heard in depth as her ‘story’ develops over three years, this article adds to the ‘stories’ of other linguistically diverse students in monolingual higher education contexts found elsewhere in the literature (For example, Martin, 2009; Safford & Kelly, 2010). Seo-yun’s experiences exemplify the alignment between wider ideological spaces and university implementational spaces (Hornberger, 2002) as to what count as valuable linguistic resources in monolingual public domains, such as higher education, and the multiple costs of marginalisation and exclusion of some students’ linguistic resources.