Contemporary research suggests that forming a professional identity is crucial to the process of becoming a teacher. Furthermore, a "narrative turn" has emerged as a major methodological influence for the study of identity in research on teaching. A guiding assumption of traditional narrative research is that stories act as "retrospectives," bringing to light lived experience as opportunities for identity analysis. As a complement to this traditional approach, this study takes a "discursive" approach to narrative, where identity is neither predetermined nor static, but rather emerges and is made relevant in talk, specifically conversational narratives. This 10-month, ethnographic narrative inquiry explores positioning in the conversational narratives of Japanese preservice teachers of English (JPTEs) in a Japanese teacher education program. The study highlights the challenges and concerns faced by these preservice teachers. I draw on the theoretical framework of narrative positioning analysis (Bamberg, 1997, 2003) to analyze the positions taken by the participants in everyday, narrative interactions. The three case studies demonstrate the complex ways that tellers position themselves and become positioned among societal discourses on English teaching and learning in Japan. These ways include how characters are established in a story; how stories are told in interactions; how discourse identities are tied to larger, social identities; and how counter narratives are employed by participants. Findings also highlight several emergent concerns faced by JPTEs, including native-speakerism, linguistic ownership, exam English, teacher workload, and communicative teaching approaches in Japan. Finally, findings build on the study of narrative as talk-in-interaction by illustrating new and diverse types of conversational narratives and their interactional features. This study gives a voice to narratives that are still on the fringes of narrative and identity research. Furthermore, it offers the possibility of understanding preservice teachers in new ways and of understanding teacher training programs as complex ecological systems where such awareness can help foster emergent identities in the situated process of both learning a language and learning to teach. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]