I am professionally trained as a linguist and anthropologist. My areas of interests include sociolinguistics, language socialization, Chinese linguistics, second language acquisition, language socialization, and language ideology. My work tends to analyze various linguistic patterns in larger socio-cultural contexts. My main theoretical commitments lie in a practice approach to bilingualism in an era of globalization. Much of my past research has taken the form of ethnographic and sociolinguistic studies of families, schools and communities for the Chinese Diaspora in upstate New York, working on the interplay of language learning and identity construction. This is reported in my dissertation project which explores the interplay of ethnic revitalization and heritage language maintenance for second-generation Chinese American teenagers in upstate New York.
My recent research focus has been shifted to linguistic commodification in China to track the global cultural flows of people, technologies, capital, media, and ideologies. My major objective is to explore how English, as a world language, has been packaged, marketed, distributed, and consumed by different groups of individuals involved in English language learning and training.
Research
- sociolinguistics
- second language acquisition
- pragmatics
- language and cognition
- Asian American studies, China, East Asia, North America
Education
Ph.D., Anthropology, State University of New York at Albany, 2007
BA, English, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, 2000