Neoliberalism has become the hegemonic rationality of our time, framing nearly every aspect of our social world in terms of competition. This dissertation sheds light on neoliberal infiltration and naturalization within the field of language education through three distinct but interrelated papers. "In Discourses of Dual Language Bilingual…

Remediation reform is an influential policy movement in U.S. higher education that aims to increase college completion rates. College first-year reading and writing course requirements have been a major focus of this movement, particularly prerequisite "developmental" course sequences for entering students who are deemed underprepared…

The dominant analytical approaches to Lingua Franca English interactions are largely influenced by a structuralist orientation that prioritizes verbal resources in localized face-to-face contexts. This article argues that recent developments in globalization, mobility, and digital communication call for a more complex orientation to the focus and…

Purpose: Emergent bilinguals (EBs) from Spanish-speaking households are a sizable and quickly growing segment of the preschool population in the United States. However, there is limited research on the provision of opportunities for EBs to engage in language-rich classroom discussion, particularly in English-dominant contexts where most EBs attend…

In spring 2019, without controversy or fanfare and without violating the voter mandate of Proposition 203, emergent bilinguals in Arizona were once again granted unrestricted access to dual language bilingual education after nearly 20 years. The policy change was accomplished through a seemingly small piece of legislation that reduced the daily…

Symbolic competence, "the ability to actively manipulate and shape one's environment on multiple scales of time and space" (Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008, p. 667), offers researchers and educators the ability to understand how learners position themselves. This positioning involves a vying for semiotic resources as a means to question…

This study explores how principals of dual language (DL) programs draw on two dominant societal discourses around language education--linguistic instrumentalism/neoliberalism and equity/social justice--to make sense of their programs. Through in-depth interviews with 19 principals of Spanish-English elementary school DL programs in Arizona and…

This study examines the language practices of Chinese visiting scholars on WeChat and explores the representational meanings of their translanguaging practices. An ethnographic approach combining with systematic observation, WeChat screenshot data and interviews with Chinese visiting scholars is adopted to get hold of the richness of situated…

Scholarship suggests that bilingual students' translanguaging skills -- their multilingual and multimodal communicative competencies -- should be leveraged as a valuable meaning-making resource and that translanguaging pedagogies can disrupt linguistic hierarchies and the ideologies of race, class, and nationhood that constitute them.…

Unprecedented levels of global mobility mean that culturally homogenous classrooms are now increasingly rare. This brings with it challenges for teachers and raises issues about what constitutes quality teaching and teachers. Professional standards are commonly seen as a key policy instrument through which teacher quality can be enhanced. This…

This paper considers the impact of global and national political polarisation on perspectives of instructors and learners in Arabic classrooms at Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLIFLC) in the United States with particular interest in understanding cultural conflicts that occur between instructors and learners. Instructors and…

I analyze two bills from the state legislatures of California (SB 1174) and Arizona (SB 1242) that propose to expand bilingual education where English-only education was previously the default. Using a critical discourse analysis lens to conduct a directed content analysis, I ask who bilingual education is for, why it is offered, and how the…

The field of L2 pragmatics demonstrates the effect of instructional intervention on the development of L2 learners' pragmatic competence. Nevertheless, effective instruction requires knowledge of pragmatic performances of L2 learners in naturally occurring conversations, in comparison to those of the target community speakers. This study, using a…

Symbolic competence (Kramsch, 2009, 2011) has been proposed as a crucial addition to world language learning, as it enables a language learner to negotiate the complex symbolism of words, expressions, and discursive events from the target culture in order to reference them effectively and in the appropriate contexts. However, fostering symbolic…

This study was designed to determine if language acquisition can occur in a virtual situation in the absence of explicit instruction. After spending 1 year establishing a virtual community, the authors observed and analyzed interpersonal interactions and the development of Chinese communication competence, communication models, and interaction…