Overview
My research focuses on second language multimodal interaction, analyzing the systematic use of interactional resources in richly contextualized moment-to-moment interactions. Specifically, I am interested in how participants integrate various multimodal resources, such as grammar, sound features (e.g., voice quality), body movements (e.g., gaze, gestures, facial expressions), the surroundings, and pedagogical artifacts.
Ongoing Projects
An Eye On Help
How do people know when someone needs help, and how do they turn that recognition into action? This project examines how offers of assistance are produced, recognized, and negotiated in Mandarin interaction.
In this project, I use mobile eye-tracking, first-person video, multi-angle room recordings, and Multimodal Conversation Analysis to examine how participants coordinate language, gaze, body movement, and material objects during collaborative tasks. The data make it possible to investigate not only how participants offer help, but also how they visually monitor the interaction, notice a co-participant's emerging need, and time their verbal and embodied responses moment by moment.
The study focuses on Mandarin-speaking participants with different linguistic profiles, grouped by L1 Mandarin speakers, heritage language speakers, and L2 Mandarin learners at different proficiency levels. By comparing these groups, the project examines differences between heritage and L1 Mandarin interactional practices, as well as the development of L2 interactional competence. More broadly, the project contributes to research on multilingualism, social interaction, and embodied communication, and offers implications for more interaction-oriented approaches to Mandarin language education.
Doing languages and recipient design: Emic perspectives on multilingualism in L2 education
This project grows out of a panel presented at ACAL 2025 and explores how multilingualism is enacted, managed, and made visible in L2 educational settings from an emic, interactional perspective. As an ongoing collaborative effort, the project aims to develop an edited volume that contributes to discussions on multilingual interaction, agency, justice, and inclusion in L2 education.
Changes in students’ use of 那 na in Chinese classroom interaction
This project traces the developmental trajectory of how Chinese L2 learners use the token 那 na, which canonically functions as a demonstrative pronoun in Mandarin. Using Interactional Linguistics and a cross-sectional design, the study compares learners' use of na across varying proficiency levels. The data consists of 20 hours of video recordings from 13 university-level CSL classrooms. Preliminary analysis reveals a developmental trend: as proficiency increases, na diversifies into a discourse marker, using to manage conversational sequences and topics.
Completed Projects
Teacher’s Designedly Incomplete Utterances in Mandarin-as-a-Second-Language-Classroom Interaction (Ph.D. Dissertation)
This project focuses on a particular form of teachers’ talk where a teacher halts their verbal language resulting in their sentence becoming grammatically unfinished. It examines how teachers integrate multimodal resources, such as grammar, sound features (e.g. voice quality), body movement (e.g. gaze, gesture, facial expression), the surroundings (e.g. blackboards and slides), and materials (e.g. textbooks), when unfinished utterances are produced. The data are 18.5 hours of video-recorded interactions between teachers and adult learners in Chinese-as-a-second-language-classrooms in Beijing. This study aims to discuss how and why teachers’ multimodal resources (can) contribute to classroom teaching and learning, such as students’ participation, understanding, and knowledge display.
From ‘Monster’ to Mentor: Developing PhD Supervision Competencies
- Role: Collaborator
- Principal Investigator: Victoria Ruétalo. Funded by: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
This study explores the development of Ph.D. supervision competencies at Canadian universities through a humane-centered values perspective, specifically the ethics of care. It examines the key competencies that define “excellence” and “acceptable” supervision. The participants include professors and Ph.D. students from the University of Alberta, along with graduate academic administrators from 8 universities within the U15 Group of Canadian Research Universities. The findings aim to enhance the Ph.D. student experience, assist adjudication committees in defining excellence, and establish a research-based performance model. Most importantly, it offers baseline indicators to guide supervisors in the Canadian university context.
The Development of the Interactional Competence of English Teachers in China, Chongqing Technology and Business University
- Role: Collaborator
- Principal Investigator: Hongmei Zhu, Chongqing Technology and Business University. Funded by: The Ministry of Education of China
Interactional functions of suoyi 'so' in Mandarin conversation (M.A. Thesis)
Adopting the methodology of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, this study examines the interactional functions of suoyi when it occurs at different sequential positions in Mandarin conversation. The data for this study are 12 hours of naturalistic Mandarin conversation. An examination of the data shows that suoyi can be used at turn-initial, mid-turn, and turn-final positions. This study describes the undocumented usages of suoyi in Mandarin conversation and contributes to our understanding of the interactional functions of suoyi from a cross-linguistic perspective.
Using Scaffolding Teacher Feedback with Adult ESL Student Writers
- Award received: Outstanding Scholar Recognition for academic excellence in Action Research, University of San Diego (2013)