This study highlights the role, if any, that teacher education programmes and experiences from other practices play in influencing generalist student teachers’ tales of themselves as emergent primary mathematics teachers. The conceptual framework Patterns of Participation, PoP, is used when theorising and interpreting student teachers’ becoming, and analysing the processual and dynamic character of immediate social interaction related to practice on a macro level. Therefore this paper evaluates whether Systemic Functional Linguistics, SFL, can be a methodological tool used on the micro level. This paper shows that SFL structures the data in a way that makes interpretations through PoP possible.