This study explores the establishment and evolution of an informal online community, tracing how it developed and evolved. More specifically, the study analyzed the characteristics of the online space, as well as how members engaged within the community, including participation patterns, preferences, and opinions and identity construction. The…

Writer identity has gradually become a focus in writing scholarship in recent years. From a social constructivist lens, writer identity is not optional; it resides in all texts. And it is a construct that does not exist in a vacuum, but is shaped by the sociocultural and academic context, and simultaneously individual writers agentively select…

This qualitative narrative research investigated successful cases of international students who actively verbally participate and speak up during academic or coursework discussions in the classrooms. More specifically, the aim of this narrative inquiry was to capture the lived and living experiences of English language learners (ELLs) navigating…

This dissertation explores the experiences of East Asian international doctoral students in clinical supervision within counselor education programs in the United States. With the increasing enrollment of international students in these programs, understanding their unique challenges and strategies for success in supervision is essential. Using a…

This research seeks to understand how secondary science students make space for themselves in the classroom. Specifically, this study examines the interplay between classroom structures and students' agentic negotiations while identifying the relationship between students' enacted agency and their authored science identities by drawing from a…

The field of autonomous language learning in second language acquisition has experienced significant growth since its introduction by Holec in the 1980s. Several studies have explored how to promote learning autonomy in various spaces, including online learning environments. However, research related to autonomous language learning in online…

This work examines how social media users learn language alongside their progression of becoming active participants in online social spaces. Using an ecolinguistic view, it explores how the process of posting and commenting on Reddit (one of the world's most popular social sites) is both afforded and constrained by the unique sociocultural…

The purpose of this dissertation was to provide teachers, principals, district administrators, and local, state, and national legislators with an understanding of what the perception is of Hispanic American Immigrant parents regarding their access to parental engagement and agency through the American public school system, specifically elementary…

The purpose of this basic qualitative study is to examine the perceptions of Language 2 (L2) learners about project-based learning (PBL) at a Midwestern high school to acquire their mathematical concepts in English. L2 learners' insights using a PBL environment to construct their skills for college readiness, higher order thinking, autonomy,…

The founding and inception of Coral Way's bilingual program marked the beginning of Miami's multilingual era, as well as the start of modern bilingual education in the U.S. As multilingual and multicultural Miami has evolved, bilingual programming has not remained a priority in the school district. This dissertation study examines how language…

Teaching and learning online was extensively adopted in English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher education program, as well in education of all levels in China with the advancement of the internet, multimedia information processing, cloud computing, and other information technologies since 1994. However, online education has remained more of a…

Long-term English learners (LTELs) are students who were identified as English learners (EL) when they entered U.S. schools and continue to be ELs for 5 or more years. Although many factors influence LTEL status, student performance on standardized language and achievement tests particularly shape their trajectory through school. Yet, little is…

As the online education market continues to expand globally, teaching and advertising have converged in digital spaces in unprecedented ways. Driven by the attention economy, independent online educators must compete to cultivate a consumer base. To attract followers, they must engage not only in online teaching activities but also in…

With the increasing number of young emergent multilingual language learners in transnational contexts, there is a growing need to explore and examine how emergent multilingual children develop their translingual competence and how they exercise their agency to engage in translingual practices across different settings (e.g., home and school). Yet,…

We are currently experiencing unprecedented waves of forced migration (UNHCR, 2022a), leading to an increase in anti-refugee rhetorics which in turn fuel policies that have life or death consequences for refugees (Gotlib, 2017). In this context, refugee voices are urgently needed in scholarly, public, and political realms, yet these perspectives…