Author Biographies
Dr. Natalie Amgott is a Teaching Assistant Professor of French at the University of Pittsburgh. Her teaching interests lie at the intersection of the theory and practice of language learning. Specifically, in her teaching she strives to create resources and project-based learning that incorporate multimedia from French and Francophone films, television, social media, music, and news resources. Amgott’s research has been published in Foreign Language Annals, Journal of Literacy Research, L2 Journal, and The Journal of Language, Identity, & Education.
Dr. Hina Ashraf is an Associate Research Professor at Georgetown University. She studies multilingualism, dual language immersion, and language policy in both domestic and international educational contexts. Her research examines how language policies influence teacher preparation, classroom instruction, and students’ access to heritage languages, with particular attention to less commonly taught languages (LCTLs). Ashraf’s work has appeared in Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, Current Issues in Language Planning, and Language Policy. She collaborates with Dual Language Immersion programs, investigating biliteracy development, teacher knowledge, and classroom practices. Committed to socially just and culturally responsive pedagogy, she engages in teacher professional development and curriculum design that bridges policy and practice while advancing equitable opportunities for multilingual learners. Through her scholarship, Ashraf seeks to support heritage language maintenance, promote linguistic equity, and advance dual language and multilingual education globally. The research in this chapter was part of a larger project funded by an International Research and Studies Program grant (award number P017A230040) from the U.S. Department of Education.
Dr. Wenhao Diao is currently an Associate Professor in East Asian Studies and Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Arizona, where she also serves as the Department Chair of East Asian Studies. Dr. Diao’s research interests include identity and ideology in language learning, with a particular focus on study abroad and the learning and teaching of Chinese.
Dr. Adriana R. Díaz, PhD (she/her/ella) is a critical languages and intercultural education scholar born in Argentina, and based for over two decades on unceded lands colonised as Brisbane, Australia. Her work reimagines language education as a transformative, justice-oriented practice, interrogating the colonial, patriarchal, and raciolinguistic structures that shape curricula and teaching resources. Adriana is committed to developing inclusive, reflective, and socially engaged pedagogies that centre diverse voices and lived experiences. This commitment underpins her work as Senior Lecturer in the Spanish and Latin American Studies Program, at the School of Languages and Cultures, The University of Queensland. Her practice extends beyond academia, advocating for Open Educational Resources (OER) that challenge hegemonic knowledge production and support more equitable (language) learning environments. She is the author of Developing Critical Languaculture Pedagogies in Higher Education: Theory and Practice (2013, Multilingual Matters), co-editor (with Maria Dasli) of The Critical Turn in Language and Intercultural Communication Pedagogy (2017, Routledge) and co-author (with Chantal Crozet) of Tertiary Language Teacher-Researchers Between Ethics and Politics – Silent Voices, Unseized Spaces (2020, Routledge).
Dr. Neriko Musha Doerr received a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Cornell University. Her research interests include language and power, education (world language education; heritage language education), politics of difference, spatial politics, automobility, civic engagement, and study abroad and alternative break trips in the United States, Japan, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Her publications include The Native Speaker Concept: Ethnographic Investigations of “Native Speaker Effects” (Mouton de Gruyter), Heritage, Nationhood, and Language: Cases of Migrants with Japanese Connections (Routledge), Constructing the Heritage Language Learner: Knowledge, Power, and New Subjectivities(Mouton de Gruyter), The Global Education Effect and Japan: Constructing New Borders and Identification Practices(Routledge), The Politics of “Incompetence”: Learning Language, Relations of Power, and Daily Resistance (Lexington Books), Counter Standardization: Exploring Liberatory Language Practices around “Japanese” (Mouton de Gruyter), Post-Unit Thinking Pedagogies: Teaching to Live beyond Categories (Springer Nature), Paradox of Difference (Berghahn Books), and articles in various peer-reviewed journals, such as Critical Discourse Studies, Critical Studies in Education, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, International Multilingual Research Journal, Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, Language and Education, Learning, Media, and Technologies, Pedagogies: An International Journal, and Writing Systems Research. She currently teaches at Ramapo College in New Jersey, U.S.A.
Dr. Sébastien Dubreil‘s research focuses on designing and framing complex learning experiences that foster language and culture learning. He critically examines the affordances of technological tools—such as games, multimedia, telecollaboration and generative AI—to reimagine pedagogical practices and promote active, collaborative learning. Currently, he is exploring the potential of social pedagogies, linguistic landscapes and ludic approaches to second language learning through both gameplay and game design. This includes (1) Games for French a board game archive developed in collaboration with Sabrina Culyba, founder and principal at Ludoliminal; (2) Bonne Chance, an online game co-created with Cary Staples, professor of design at the University of Tennessee and a 2015 Reimagine Education conference finalist; (3) a platform for place-based mobile experiences. Both graduate and undergraduate students contribute to these projects; and (4) all kinds of pedagogical interventions inspired by maker culture, often collaborating with his colleague Stephan Caspar. His research has been published in The Modern Language Journal, CALICO Journal, Foreign Language Annals, L2 Journal and the International Journal of Pedagogies and Learning Environments, among others.
Dr. Julieta Fernández currently holds a faculty appointment in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington (NZ) and in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Arizona (US). Her research seeks to advance our understanding of second language teaching and learning in the at-home and study abroad (SA) contexts, with a special focus on pragmatics (the study of language use in social interaction). Her publications have appeared in such journals as Journal of Pragmatics, Modern Language Journal, Applied Pragmatics, Spanish Language Teaching, and Foreign Language Annals.
Dr. Hongni Gou is a language educator and researcher committed to bridging classroom practice and scholarly inquiry. She earned her Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching from the University of Arizona and currently works with K–12 multilingual learners of English in Arizona. Her research examines how language learners negotiate their identities and how questions of equity and social justice shape second language learning (or vice versa). She is particularly interested in exploring these issues in study abroad and K–12 educational contexts.
Dr. David Gramling (they+) is author, editor, or translator of eight books in print: Literature in Late Monolingualism (Bloomsbury 2024); The Invention of Multilingualism (Cambridge University Press, 2021); The Invention of Monolingualism (Bloomsbury 2016, American Association for Applied Linguistics Book Award, 2018); co-author of Palliative Care Conversations: Clinical and Applied Linguistic Perspectives (De Gruyter 2019, with David’s big brother Robert Gramling); Linguistic Disobedience: Restoring Power to Civic Language (Palgrave 2019, with Yuliya Komska and Michelle Moyd); Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration 1955–2005 (University of California Press 2007 with Deniz Göktürk and Anton Kaes); and Transit Deutschland: Debatten zu Nation und Migration (Konstanz University Press / Wallstein Verlag, with Deniz Göktüurk, Anton Kaes, and Andreas Langenohl). David’s book-length co-translation (with Aron Aji) of Murathan Mungan’s Turkish-language Shahmeran story cycle Valor: Stories (Cenk Hikâyeleri) was published in Fall 2023 with Northwestern University Press, and made possible by a 2021 Global Humanities Translation Prize from Northwestern University. Future books include Translating Transgender (with Aniruddha Dutta, Routledge 2026), and Aloof: On Seeing Less than you Should, which details David’s lifelong social and logistical adventure with their ocular albinism, a rare congenital visual Disability.
Dr. Emily Hellmich (PhD, University of California, Berkeley) is the Associate Director of the Berkeley Language Center. Her research focuses on the impacts of digital technologies on language, language use, and language education, with publications in the fields of education, applied linguistics, Second Language Acquisition (SLA), and technology-enhanced language learning.
Dr. Kris Aric Knisely is Associate Professor of French and Intercultural Competence and affiliated faculty in the Second Language Acquisition and Teaching PhD program as well as in the Trans Studies Research Cluster at the University of Arizona. Knisely’s research focuses on gender justice in language education and research.
Jisuk Park received an MA in Japanese Linguistics and Pedagogy from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the U.S. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Japanese Language at the University of Toronto in Canada. Her research interests include language pedagogy, critical pedagogy, project-based learning, curriculum design, and the application of the Social Networking Approach to foreign language education, as well as recent studies on supporting students with learning difficulties. Her publications include Social Networking Approach to Japanese Language Teaching: The Intersection of Language and Culture in the Digital Age (Routledge) and Hiyaku: An Intermediate Japanese Course (Routledge). Prior to joining the University of Toronto in 2021, she taught Japanese language courses from the beginner to advanced levels at Columbia University in New York (2002–2019). In the summer, she also taught at Princeton University’s Ishikawa Summer Intensive Program as well as at the Hokkaido International Foundation. Additionally, she served as an executive board member of the Canadian Association for Japanese Language Education from 2020 to 2024. She is currently an executive board member of the Association for Social Networking Approach and Collaborative Online International Learning (SNA-COIL).
Kimiko Suzuki is Lecturer of Japanese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Haverford College, Pennsylvania, and has previously taught Japanese at University of Notre Dame and Pennsylvania State University. She earned her M.A. in Japanese at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests lie in language pedagogy and curriculum development. Her publication include “Practicing counter-meta-standardization in Japanese-as-a-Foreign-Language classroom in the US” in the book Linguistic Counter-Standardization (Mouton de Gruyter, 2024), and “On the goals of language education and teacher diversity: Beliefs and experiences of Japanese-language educators in North America” with Junko Mori, Atsushi Hasegawa, and Jisuk Park in Japanese Language and Literature (2020)
Dr. Jamie A. Thomas is a Lecturer in Linguistics and TESOL at California State University, Dominguez Hills. In 2022, she was recognized with the Distance Education Excellence award at Santa Monica College, where she taught linguistics after previous roles at Middlebury College and Swarthmore College. She was also awarded a national Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship (2021-2022) for equity-focused research on student success in introductory linguistics. Most recently, she joined Cypress College as Dean of Social Sciences, and has since continued to contribute to faculty professional development as a facilitator and course developer. Her forthcoming book, Zombies Speak Swahili, explores the learning and teaching of Swahili in global perspective.
Dr. Emma Trentman is an Associate Professor of Arabic at the University of New Mexico and Director of the Language Learning Center. She is an Applied Linguist whose research examines language learning during study abroad, virtual exchange, and in the language classroom, with a focus on language ideologies and multilingual approaches. She is co-editor of Language Learning in Study Abroad: The Multilingual Turn (Multilingual Matters, 2021), and her research has appeared in various journals and edited collections including The Modern Language Journal, Foreign Language Annals, The L2 Journal, Study Abroad Research, and System. She directs the Arabic program at the University of New Mexico and is co-editor of the Critical Multilingualism Studies Journal.
Dr. Kimberly Vinall (PhD, University of California, Berkeley) is the Executive Director of the Berkeley Language Center (BLC) at University of California, Berkeley. With publications in the fields of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), her research explores the critical potentials of digital tools, like machine translation, to support language/culture learning and the development of digital literacy skills.
Dr. Chantelle Warner is Professor of German Studies and Associate Dean for Academic and Faculty Affairs in the College of Humanities at the University of Arizona. Dr. Warner’s research focuses on affective, experiential, and aesthetic dimensions of language use and learning, foreign language literacy development, pedagogical stylistics, and critical multilingualism studies and she has published and presented widely across these areas. Her most recent monograph, Multiliteracy Play: Designs and Desires in the Second Language Classroom (Bloomsbury, 2024), argues for an expansion of models of literacy development and related pedagogies in second language teaching and learning to better integrate not only a wider range practices and modalities, but also different aesthetic and feeling rules that tacitly shape our responses to different language uses. Most recently she has been working on an empirical project that aims to capture the role of emotion labor and pedagogies of care in adult second language teaching.