This three-paper dissertation uses social network analysis to examine the literacy development and small group discourse of multilingual students in Grades 4 and 5. The data come from a randomized-controlled trial testing the effectiveness of homogeneous and heterogeneous small groups for English learners. The first paper tests whether two types…

This dissertation aimed to expand the current literature's understanding of Indigenous epistemology within contemporary social media environments. The qualitative study used social descriptive analysis from forty TikTok videos and comment threads. The descriptive analysis captured major cultural themes, common informal learning behaviors, and…

Work and learning are essential facets of our existence, yet sociocultural barriers have historically limited access and opportunity for women in multiple contexts, including their professional pursuits. Such sociocultural barriers are particularly pronounced in technical domains and have relegated minoritized voices to the margins. As a result of…

A new generation is growing up who have known the internet for their entire lives. More people incorporate social media into more aspects of our lives, including how we learn and negotiate our identities. While formal online classrooms such as MOOCs are a part of the picture, learning also occurs in informal settings such as affinity groups'…

Written as two interconnected articles, this dissertation study is about identifying literacy practices that are inclusive of multiple ways of being, knowing, and doing. Using these, the purpose of this study is to create a framework of inclusive literacy practices that teachers and researchers can use--implement and refine--based on their…

The ubiquitous hashtag has disruptively transformed how news stories are reported and shared across social media networks. Often, such text streams are massively multilingual with 50 different languages on an average and contain a combination of subjective user opinion, objective evolving information about the story and unrelated spam. This is in…

How are linguistic and cognitive practices shared among individuals (and more broadly) populations and cultures? Further, how are cognitive strategies shared at the local level? Li and colleagues (Li & Gleitman 2002; Li et al 2011; "inter alia") suggest that the variation observed in reference frame practices among populations of the…

This study examines the construction of disability identities in personal and vicarious narratives. Sociolinguistic research on narrative focuses largely on personal narrative (Schiffrin 1996); some studies claim that vicarious narratives lack coherence and evaluation (Labov and Waletzky 1967; Chafe 1994) and have no natural relation to the…

The Internet, as a digital record of human discourse, provides an opportunity to directly analyze political communicative behavior. The rapid emergence of social online networks augurs a transformation in the quality and quantity of information people have to evaluate their political system. Digital formats instantiate new categories of actors and…

This work approaches the concept of social media engagement through a lens of participation theory. Following the work of Goffman (1981) and others, this dissertation uses the concepts of the participation framework and the participant role to explore engagement as a function of participation in interaction. The purposes of this dissertation are…

Automation can mitigate issues when scaling and managing quality and identity in public discourse on the web. Discourse needs to be curated and filtered. Anonymous speech has to be supported while handling adversaries. Reliance on human curators or analysts does not scale and content can be missed. These scaling and management issues include the…

A growing number of people study languages online, and little is known about their attitudes toward this new learning approach, what practices they engage in, or what kinds of interaction they are involved in. This dissertation investigates users' attitudes, practices, and interactions on the largest language-learning social network site,…

This dissertation explores the incorporation of Facebook into everyday live activities and practices of a group of young Turkish-American women affiliated with a faith-based movement, known as the "Hizmet" (volunteer's service) movement. In particular, I examine the emergent communicative practices and performances of these young…

Through analysis of a qualitative online ethnography in an Internet text-based website message board database called "WidowNet" (http://www.widownet.org/wnbb3), I studied online text conversations of adults who lost their life partners to death. This online autoethnographical research investigates how and why online widows/widowers perform their…

Over the past few years, content developers searching for new markets have found a potentially lucrative consumer base in local and location-based services as new media platforms have begun to "expand" their focus to hyper-local place-based communities. This shift to "local 2.0" has given birth to "local listing sites," an emerging social medium…