The effect of teacher education is of international interest, at the same time expectations on newly educated teachers increase. Deep understanding of what it means to become a primary school mathematics teacher is necessary and this constitutes the focus in the research project. The aim of this paper is to illustrate how two conceptual frameworks, System Functional Linguistics and Patterns of Participation, have been used in the study. The first has been used as a methodological tool and the second as an analytical tool. The use of these will be illustrated by the case of Lisa, a student teacher. The results show that System Functional Linguistics successfully disentangles the heritage of Lisa’s past and present practices, and facilitates interpretations through Patterns of Participation.