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Construction Grammar has been a prominent framework in linguistic research fornearly three decades, attracting scholars from various disciplines, including language acquisition, corpus linguistics, and psycholinguistics. While considerable progress has been made in understanding the first language (L1) construction learning of various languages, research on second language (L2) acquisition of constructions has predominantly focused on English, particularly on verb argument structures. However, there exists a significant gap in the literature regarding the L2 acquisition of constructions in Mandarin Chinese. This dissertation employs a constructionist approach to investigate L2 acquisition of Chinese constructions, including the aspect marker le, constructions containing gei, and the bei passive construction. The objective is to provide a comprehensive understanding of L2 acquisition of Chinese constructions, supported by empirical evidence. The first part of the dissertation delves into the impact of input frequency and textbook exposure on the L2 acquisition of the aspect marker le. It uncovers how learners comprehend this functional morpheme and its meaning, shedding light on the influence of textbooks and the progression of learners’ proficiency. The second part examines the L2 acquisition of constructions containing gei. This investigation explores how learners acquire the meaning of these forms based on the positioning of gei, revealing the nuances and complexities of L2 construction learning. The third and final part of the dissertation delves into the bei passive construction, focusing on its adversative meaning and the role of pragmatics in construction learning. This study explores how learners associate the bei passive construction with adversity. In summary, this dissertation significantly contributes to our understanding of L2 construction learning in Chinese. The findings are not only pertinent to linguistic research but also hold pedagogical significan

This qualitative research examines the construction and negotiation of Japanese language teacher identities (LTIs) both inside and outside classrooms at public universities in the United States. In the past fifteen years, Japanese has become one of the most studied foreign languages at college level (Furman et al., 2010; Goldberg et al., 2015; Looney & Lusin, 2019), and Japanese language teachers play crucial roles in the learning journey of Japanese language learners. However, little attention has been given to Japanese LTIs and how the professional identities affect their practice in language teaching and other working contexts. Given the impact of identity on a teacher’s foreign language teaching, the current study aims to address this gap and expand the current knowledge of Japanese LTIs by exploring the narratives, positionings, and identity formation of nine Japanese language teachers at various career stages from five public universities. Data were collected over eight months through Zoom interviews, class observations and recordings of instructors’ meetings. Thematic analysis and positioning analysis are employed to analyze the data. Findings revealed individual and environmental factors that influence Japanese language teachers’ professional identities in the workplace, including self-perceptions, beliefs, emotions and feelings, and how these personal traits interacted with surrounding contexts. This study also uncovered how teachers negotiate their identities in the social interactions with other colleagues by positioning themselves and others, particularly on three unrepresented groups: non-native Japanese language teachers, non-native Japanese instructors, and Japanese GTAs. Finally, implications for teacher education and professional development of Japanese language teachers are discussed.

Acquisition of the perfective marker -le in Mandarin Chinese is a daunting task for second language learners. To date, there has been no consensus on what it is about -le that makes it such a challenge to learners. This study investigates the acquisition of -le from both a lexical perspective and a discourse perspective. I test two hypotheses: (1) whether the distribution of -le in lexical aspectual class, i.e., state, activity, accomplishment, and achievement, plays a role in the way L2 learners use -le, as predicted by the Aspect Hypothesis; and (2) whether the distinction in discourse between foregrounding and backgrounding plays a role in the way L2 learners use -le, as predicted by the Discourse Hypothesis. Three proficiency levels of participants participated in an oral storytelling task: Frog, Where Are You, in Chinese. The results show that both the Aspect Hypothesis and the Discourse Hypothesis are supported. All of the participants used -le to distinguish foreground and background, and they also used -le predominately with achievements. Lower-level participants differ from higher-level speakers in that they produced much less -le with bounding materials in foreground with achievement predicates. It is concluded that the challenge of acquiring -le comes from the syntactic complexity of -le with bounding materials, rather than lexical aspect or grounding.

Academic discourse socialization (ADS) is the process during which novices and newcomers learn the academic practices and values involved in their disciplines (Kobayashi, Zappa-Hollman, & Duff, 2017). Scholars have investigated domestic and international students' socialization into academic discourse by examining small group team discussions (e.g., Ho 2011; Vickers 2007), academic presentations, (e.g., Kobayashi, 2016; Morton, 2009; Tracy, 1997; Yang, 2010), one-to-one conferences (e.g., Gilliland, 2014), and students’ out-of-class collaborations and interactions (e.g., Fei, 2016; Morita, 2009; Seloni, 2012; Shi, 2011). Although research teams have been one of the major sites of disciplinary practice and socialization, relatively few studies have examined the ADS processes of novices in engineering research teams in STEM fields (e.g., Lei & Hu, 2015; Li, 2007). The findings of previous studies have exemplified the highly multimodal nature of academic communication in STEM fields; however, they have not presented detailed accounts of how novices are socialized into academic discourse through team practices and interactions. This situated qualitative study addresses this research ga by focusing on the academic discourse socialization processes of three international graduate students in an engineering research team. More specifically, it examines how the students were socialized into two research genres—conference presentations and research articles—through weekly research team meetings and collaborative writing practices. Data were collected over the course of 15 months and included video recordings of research team meetings, semi-structured interviews, extensive field notes, and student artifacts. Data analysis was conducted with thematic coding. The focal research team was an interdisciplinary research lab that focused on Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). The findings indicate that while socializing novice researchers into conference presentations, the research te

Identities are constructed using various tools, both linguistic and non-linguistic. The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the relationship between ideologies (images/understandings/views), linguistic styles, other aspects of style (e.g., clothing and physical appearances) and identity construction in the social interactions of Japanese female pop-idols (i.e., aidoru), taking as its basis theories and methods from sociolinguistics and anthropology. In this research, CD jacket covers, song lyrics and documentaries were analyzed from two aidoru groups from different time periods, Onyanko Club in the 1980s and AKB48 in the present era of the 2010s. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses reveal (1) how aidoru are portrayed in the images on CD covers and song lyrics, and whether contemporary portrayals of aidoru images differ from those in the past, (2) how aidoru view aidoru identity and position themselves accordingly, (3) has the aidoru ideology, including images and social expectations, have changed over time, and (4) what kind of linguistic features aidoru use to project certain identities, and whether contemporary language use of aidoru differ from the past. The findings in the present study point to a multitude of identities for aidoru. Images on CD jacket covers, lyric content, and linguistic features in lyrics suggest that Onyanko Club embodies young female, kawaii “cute” identities, based on the members’ smiling faces, school uniforms, colorful accessories, and cutesy costumes. On the other hand, AKB48 demonstrates not only kawaii images, but also more complex traits including sexy, kakkoii “cool,” and even toughness, drawing from their various expressions which depict the members as sometimes smiling, but also sometimes serious and stern; their costumes including both cutesy and boyish school uniforms, bikinis, and tough martial arts’ garb. Thematic discourse analysis has demonstrated how AKB48 members maintain some aspects of cute and innocent

This dissertation examines the significance of human bodies in the interaction with technologies in writing. Instead of treating writing as linguistic signifiers, this work conceptualizes writing as visual traces imbued with rich information on writers’ embodied experience and bodily dynamic with the external environment. A dialectical relationship in writing—writing as embodied experience and writing as technics—undergirds the overall discussion. On the one hand, writing delivers writers’ embodied experience including bodily locomotion, sensuous feeling, and embodied creativity; on the other hand, writing’s embodiment is influenced and formulated by technics, the external prostheses that mediate embodied sensuousness. Grounded in this dialectical relationship in writing, this dissertation examines four cases—stenography, typewriter, calligraphy robots, and artificial writing—to demonstrate the interactive trajectory between external prostheses and embodied writing subjects, as well as its enmeshment with specific socio-political and historical desires, power relations, and discourses. Chinese writing, due to its traditional emphasis on embodied traces in writing, exemplifies the tensions between the two. Under the overarching dialectical relationship between embodiment and technics, this work specifically looks at labor and authorship production in each modality of writing. The development of writing technologies triggers the changes of writers’ embodied experience due to the interrelatedness of the interior and prosthetic. The expressive hand, traditionally seen as the origin of creativity and subjectivity, has been deskilled. Authorship derived from the hand has shifted thereafter. Writing technologies’ encroaching into writing subjects’ embodied domain simultaneously evidences the transition from the “human” to the “posthuman,” the latter of which illustrates the equation of human with “information-processing machines” (Hayles 2008). After looking at human-techn

This dissertation examines the changes in the occurrence of overlap in L2 Japanese learners’ conversation from the perspective of the development of interactional competence during study abroad. Previous studies have suggested that overlap of utterances in talk-in-interaction can function positively to show involvement, understanding, and cooperation and to move a conversation forward (e.g. Tannen, 1985; Maynard, 1989; Fujii & Otsuka, 1994). Given that overlap can positively contribute to the joint construction of the conversation, overlap can be considered as one of the interactional resources that participants in conversation use for effective interaction (Young, 2008). A few studies have examined L2 Japanese learners’ overlapped utterances in conversation, but the number is limited. A longitudinal study in the context of spontaneous casual conversation will lead to a further understanding of the use of overlap by L2 Japanese learners. I collected recordings of dyadic casual conversations and of pre- and post-interviews from five L2 Japanese learners who participated in one-year study abroad programs in Japan. Each student recorded three to four conversations with their native Japanese friends or host families over the course of study abroad. The interviews were conducted before and after study abroad with the investigator. Their conversations and interviews were transcribed and all instances of overlaps were extracted and analyzed. The results showed changes in both frequency and contexts in which L2 learners’ overlap was observed. All L2 learners showed an increase in the occurrence of overlap in their conversations and expanded their use of different functions of overlap in the conversation over time. Although the L2 learners developed at a different rate, they appeared to have followed a similar developmental sequence. The results suggested the influence of two main factors, linguistic ability and the degree of involvement in the conversation, on the types of

In this multi-methodological (Gee, 2011; Hult & D. Johnson, 2015) study, I examine Richard Ruiz's (2014) original concept of the epiphenomenal nature of language in language policy and planning (LPP) across social scales (Hult, 2013) in Hong Kong. While research in Hong Kong has focused on interactions between schools, teachers, students, parents, business, and the government, the work on non-profits and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) remains a neglected social scale. Addressing this gap, I examine the role of a local NGO, Hong Kong Unison (Unison), as a social actor involved in the negotiation of language-in-education policies for the city's ethnic minority students. Through the collection of one decade of publically accessible documents, I created a corpus of Unison's work. Corpus linguistics approaches and a wider-angle perspective to critical discourse analysis (cf. Tian, 2006, 2008) were combined in order to highlight salient patterns and discourses within the data (cf. Baker, 2016). Corpus and discursive analyses indicate that Unison is primarily involved in transforming language policies through their active role in increasing public awareness about the social, political, and educational difficulties ethnic minority students encounter in Hong Kong. Furthermore, the NGO’s ideologies reveal the epiphenomenal nature of LPP. Epiphenomenality reflects how decisions made about language are influenced and shaped by non-linguistic phenomena. Unison's negotiation of LPP demonstrates how their decisions about language are connected to issues of equality, justice, economic opportunity, educational attainment, and social advancement. These ideologies manifest themselves in dialogue across social scales, demonstrating Unison's impact in negotiating LPP in Hong Kong. This study, while providing more insight into LPP research by examining the role of a local NGO, continues to raise questions on how to best understand how multiple scales intersect in the policymaking

As digital games have grown into a global cultural force during the last few decades, computer-assisted language learning (CALL) researchers and second and foreign language (L2) educators have begun reconsidering games as potential L2 teaching and learning (L2TL) resources (Reinhardt, in press). One particular game genre, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) have gained particular attention among CALL researchers and L2 educators. MMORPGs distinguished themselves from earlier game genres in their ability to allow players to cooperate and compete with each other on a large scale, even around the world. They are perceived to offer the opportunity for a great deal of contextualized interaction in a learner's target language, including interaction with native speakers (Peterson, 2010). Participating in MMORPG playing could promote social-interactional language use (e.g. Peterson, 2012a, 2012b; Rama et al., 2012; Zheng et al. 2012), sometimes even intercultural interactions (e.g. Thorne, 2008), and L2 learner's willingness to communicate (Reinders & Wattana, 2014). In addition to player-to-player communication, the texts embedded in MMORPGs and the texts circulated in the player communities online illustrate multiple genres, complex structures, and features of interactive discourse (Thorne, Fischer & Lu, 2012). MMORPGs seem to present a diverse and linguistically complex environment for L2 learners. However, empirical research on how L2 learners engage with a variety of game discourses in MMORPG playing is still limited. In an attempt to better understand how MMORPG playing can be used to enhance L2TL, this dissertation examines L2 learners' engagement with game discourses within and around a MMORPG. Grounded within an ecological framework of language learning (van Lier, 2004), this dissertation investigates the interaction of game-learner-context through a mixed method approach, including quantitative (e.g. survey) and qualitative (e.g. case study)