Our research focuses on bilingual adults enrolled in the Teachers for English Language Learners (TELL) program. TELL is a scholarship program whose goal is to increase the number of critically-minded bilingual educators in the state of Georgia in the United States. In this paper, we use critical discourse analysis to inform theoretical and practical implications in language education research. First, we examine how TELL scholars address linguistic and social inequities through discourses of competency and legitimacy, using critical discourse analysis to interpret social tensions in a group of these adults. Our analysis combines close discourse analysis of focus group interview data with the macro-theoretical approach of Foucault to understand the relationship between systemic influences (e.g., standardized, corporate testing) and the life world (e.g., having conversations in and about multiple languages) as these bilingual adults become bilingual teachers in Georgia. (Contains 4 figures.)