The increasing use and popularity of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) education in diverse instructional settings has posed new challenges and opportunities in teacher education programmes. In particular, few studies have attempted to explain the specific tenets understood and enacted when transforming teacher language awareness (TLA) processes into concrete pedagogical actions when using CLIL approaches. To address this issue, this multiple case study examined three pre-service teacher education programmes in three South American nations (Argentina, Colombia and Ecuador) using a multi--layered set of data collection methods to explore the teaching perceptions and practices of five teacher educators and 58 student-teachers (i.e. pre-service teachers). The findings showed the importance of educating prospective teachers on CLIL's components to improve bilingual education endeavours. Participants demonstrated various experiences and understandings regarding teacher language awareness despite the repeated tendency to emphasise explicit (language) knowledge as a core element to develop generic and specialised registers. Our study highlights a four-component framework: (i) exploration, (ii) inductive input, (iii) reflection, and (iv) informed use regarding TLA for CLIL teacher education. The findings of this study suggest the pivotal relevance of educating the next generations of teachers in the integration of language and content in any of its forms, given the high probability that teachers may work in CLIL contexts in the future.