Few studies have focused on the identity formation of non-native English speaking teachers (NNESTs) as legitimate speakers and teachers of English. Drawing on Norton's (2000) poststructuralist theory of identity as a process of struggling and changing, this study examined whether and how Asian international students studying for a Masters in Education at an Australian University transformed their identity as legitimate speakers and teachers of English through studying a critical pedagogical unit "Language, Society and Cultural Difference." The findings revealed that the students' transformation of identity depended on symbolic resources from the unit and their imagination of new instructional teaching practices to use in their home countries. Participants' self-perception based on knowledge gained from the unit was, however, sometimes contradictory or ambivalent compared to the ways they saw themselves as speakers and teachers of English in each particular context in practice. I argue that teacher education should offer alternative discourses such as "an awareness of the right to speak" (Norton Pierce, 1995, p. 18), the "native speaker fallacy" (Phillipson, 1992), or bilingual and multilingual speaker (Cook, 1999) to enable student teachers to imagine alternative identities. This helps them not only to develop instructional teaching practices but also to legitimise themselves as speakers and teachers of English.