The construction of the professional identity of Portuguese language teachers during initial teacher education.

This paper presents the results of a research project developed with the objective of understanding, from a teacher identity and cognition perspective, the concepts constructed by pre-service teachers of what it is to be a teacher and what it means to teach and learn Portuguese in working conditions characterized by social and cultural diversity as well as economic adversity. The study reveals how two undergraduate students participating in a national teacher education program resorted to representations of the school and teaching in order to build references that constituted the foundations of both their formative experiences as teachers and the mental projections they construct of their pedagogical work and their professional identity. The data analysis focused on the referencing processes produced by the participants based on the contrast between their previous and current experiences and expectations, captured by the methodological tools that were used in the research