"Remedial Trap." "Bridge to Nowhere." "Completion Divide." Such language used to describe the field of Developmental Education (DE), especially by those outside the field, is undeniably deficit oriented. In this manuscript, we initiate a dialog that critiques such portrayals of DE, particularly those that appear in…

This study explores the experience of high-achieving students of color in an honors program at a large research university. Qualitative methods involve surveying students (n = 39) and interviewing a select group (n = 5) in attempts to measure both the frequency and severity of racial microaggression as well as subjective experience relating to…

College classroom communication in the United States is linked to critical issues that are constructed in the larger sociopolitical and political background. As social conflicts and the unstable political environment in the U.S. continue to escalate, universities are caught in the midst of agitated public debates where identity politics continue…

Within neoliberal models of U.S. higher education, diversity is a prominent selling point in education discourse, but diversity practices often fail to meet the needs or expectations of the structurally marginalized students they purportedly benefit. Research in education and critical university studies has interrogated the concept of diversity…

We tested sarcasm production and identification across original communicators in a spontaneously produced conversational setting, including testing the role of synchronous movement on sarcasm production and identification. Before communicating, stranger dyads participated in either a synchronous or nonsynchronous movement task. They then completed…

Because presidents hold unique and important powerful roles that influence the formation of organizational identities and cultures, we used critical discourse analysis of 80 presidents' letters to analyze presidents' messages to their campuses and to uncover their discourses and assumptions surrounding Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals…

Causal sequences can be segmented into cause and effect. However, some argue causal relations in discourse are by default in "effect-cause" order. Others claim "cause-effect" order is easier to process and the default way of expressing causality, due to iconicity. We conducted experiments testing participants' production…

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…

The use of science classroom discourse analysis as a way to gain a better understanding of various student cognitive outcomes has a rich history in Science Education in general and Physics Education Research (PER) in particular. When students talk to each other in a collaborative peer instruction environment, such as in the CLASP classes…

This study investigates the dynamics in the Spanish classroom between heritage language learner (HLL) dyads, second language learner (L2L) dyads, and mixed HLL-L2L dyads. Specifically, it examines oral, written and embodied discourse that informs our understanding of how learners attend to language. Analysis for this dissertation examined…

Agile development has received increasing interest both in industry and academia due to its benefits in developing software quickly, meeting customer needs, and keeping pace with the rapidly changing requirements. However, agile practices and scrum in particular have been mainly tested in mid- to large-size projects. In this paper, we present…

If college writing faculty wish to prepare students to engage in civic forums, then how might we prepare students to write and speak amid racial politics on our campuses? This article explores the college student discourse that shaped an interracial conflict at a public California university in 2002 and questions the "rhetoric of injury"…

This paper is based on an analysis of chat transcripts from an English-language telecollaboration project between students at universities in Chile and California. This research found that the richest intercultural interactions involved events that could not have been foreseen: the immigrant rights demonstrations in the USA and the massive student…

This study explores task-based, synchronous oral computer-mediated communication (CMC) among intermediate-level learners of Spanish. In particular, this paper examines (a) how learners in video and audio CMC groups negotiate for meaning during task-based interaction, (b) possible differences between both oral CMC modes and traditional face-to-face…