My life trajectory, family and everyday environment are inherently multilingual and multicultural, which makes me appreciate holistic and ecological perspectives associated with the study of language acquisition and pedagogy, bilingualism, culture studies and language policy.
Associate Professor
I explore such topics as acquisition of motion structures, expressive morphology, identity repertoire, affective talk and expression of culturally-mediated concepts by second, foreign and heritage language learners.
I study the dynamics of language development as it interrelates with students’ learning histories and sociocultural milieus. My particular interest is in computer-assisted language education and the affordances that it creates for fostering learner self-expression, inquiry-based learning, democracy in language classrooms and global citizenship.
In order to facilitate this type of learning, I launched the Telecollaboration for World Language Education website, an exciting 2.0 web resource created to facilitate world language education by offering free access to resources on the educational practice of telecollaboration and to audio-video materials in Russian and English created by university students for peer audiences and ripe for linguistic, cultural and academic exploration.