Elizabeth R Miller
Biographic Data
| ID | 3843492 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Elizabeth R Miller |
| GIVEN NAMES | Elizabeth R |
| FAMILY NAME | Miller |
| SIGNATURE | MILLER E R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of North Carolina at Charlotte |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1820-0268 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 154 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Emotions and Language Education
In this article, we discuss research on emotions and language education with a particular focus on articles published in TESOL Quarterly between 2010 and 2024, in celebration of the journal's 60th anniversary. Given that this is the first time that a TESOL Quarterly anniversary issue has highlighted emergent and prominent trends in research related to emotions in language education, we begin our discussion by briefly outlining the background of t…
Language Program Administrators' Accounts of Nurturing Teacher Belonging and its Emotional Effects
Feeling a sense of belonging is increasingly regarded as vital for language teacher wellbeing and for determining whether they want to become teachers and/or remain in the field. However, we understand very little about how or whether the administrators who directly supervise them understand the significance of belonging or actively work to nurture it among teachers. This study draws on interview and questionnaire data provided by 30 Language Pro…
Commentary: Exploring “the pinch” of emotion labor in language teacher research
This brief Commentary examines how the nine articles in the Special Issue on Second Language Teacher Emotion Labor build on sociologist Arlie Hochschild's conceptualization of emotional labor as well as more recent poststructuralist orientations to language teacher emotion labor by scholars in applied linguistics. To that end, it focuses on two common themes that run throughout these articles: the effects of feeling rules on language teachers and…
Investigating Entanglements in Experienced Language Teachers’ Sense of Belonging and What Belonging Does
The vast body of research on language teacher identity from the past two decades along with more recent research on language teacher emotions has shown that identity and emotions are mutually shaping facets of language teachers’ professional lives. (Un)belonging is a key link between teacher identity and emotions in that the feeling of belonging typically corresponds to insider identities and unbelonging with peripheral or outsider status. Howeve…
Exploring Teacher Caring as a “Happy Object” in Language Teacher Accounts of Happiness
This article explores how the language teachers in our study associated particular teaching experiences with feeling happy in qualitative interview accounts. Adopting a critical poststructural orientation, it uses the concept of sticky objects (Ahmed 2010; Benesch 2017) to explore how contexts, social discourses, relationships and emotional norms are entangled in and shape emotions such as happiness. More particularly, it adopts Ahmed’s (2010) no…
Commentary: Understanding Emotions in EMI Institutions through Attending to Context, History, and Ideology
Relationality in language teacher emotion regulation: Regulating emotions through, with and for others
Although previous research has shown that teaching is replete with emotion (Zembylas, 2004) and that emotion regulation should be viewed as a key teacher competence (Brackett, Palomera, Mojsa-Kaja, Reyes, & Salovey, 2010; Gkonou & Mercer, 2017), there is still much that we do not know about how such regulation is performed in teachers’ day-to-day teaching practice. In this article, we explore the nature of emotion regulation among 50 language tea…
An Exploration of Language Teacher Reflection, Emotion Labor, and Emotional Capital
In this article the researchers explore the notion of emotional capital in relation to language teachers’ emotion labor and the role of reflection in understanding their emotional experiences. They draw on interview narratives with teachers ( N = 25) working in higher education institutions in the United States and United Kingdom. During these interview conversations, the researchers elicited accounts of teachers’ emotionally charged experiences …
Caring and emotional labour: Language teachers’ engagement with anxious learners in private language school classrooms
This study examines how a group of eight teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) in Greece discuss their efforts to address their students’ language anxiety (LA). We found that in most cases, these teachers’ efforts are motivated by an ethic of care (Noddings, 1988, 2005, 2013) in which they seek to construct positive relationships with students in order to help mitigate their students’ LA. Though desirable, such efforts often result in ‘…
Language teacher agency, emotion labor and emotional rewards in tertiary-level English language programs
Re-Examining and Re-Envisioning Criticality in Language Studies: Theories and Praxis
As critical perspectives in language studies have gained legitimacy and even mainstream status in applied linguistics, it is necessary to re-examine the meaning of criticality in language studies and to re-envision criticality for further development. The authors explore criticality from several theoretical perspectives as well as from the notion of praxis. They review three major theoretical threads—namely, postmodernist constructionism includin…
The ideology of learner agency and the neoliberal self
This paper compares how the neoliberal self and the agentive language learner self have been conceptualized in the scholarly literature. It shows that both selves are construed as self‐regulating and free to choose, but that they are treated very differently in terms of origin or essence. In discussing the apparent contradiction between the neoliberal self as an ideological effect and the agentive self as naturally agentive, the paper proposes a …
Positioning selves, doing relational work and constructing identities in interview talk
This article draws on positioning theory and uses Bamberg’s (2005) three-level analytic approach to analyze how identity construction and relational work implicate the other and are co-constitutive processes in local interactions. To that end, it examines a sequence of excerpts taken from an interview involving the author and a Vietnamese woman and analyzes the co-constructed positioning of self and other that developed over the course of the int…
Reconstructing gender ideologies of English loanwords in Chinese
Agency, language learning, and multilingual spaces
This article explores the notion of agency in language learning and use as discursively, historically, and socially mediated. It further explores how agency can be understood as variously enabled and constrained as individuals move from one cultural, linguistic, and/or geographical space to another. These explorations focus on how agency is constituted in language and interaction, and how the ‘agency of spaces’ is both constituted by such interac…
Agency, language learning, and multilingual spaces
Indeterminacy and Interview Research: Co-constructing Ambiguity and Clarity in Interviews with an Adult Immigrant Learner of English†
This article adopts a social constructionist approach in maintaining that indeterminacy of meaning is an unavoidable aspect of interview research. It uses positioning analysis to examine how subject positions and contingently constructed meanings are produced in interview interactions. The analysis focuses on excerpts from a series of three interviews with a Chinese-born immigrant to the US in which the interviewee responds to questions asking wh…
Agency in the Making: Adult Immigrants' Accounts of Language Learning and Work
This article considers language learner agency from a poststructuralist perspective, focusing on how agency is discursively constituted as individuals position themselves and are positioned as (potential) agents within ideologically defined spaces. As such, I regard agency as inherently unstable and as a discursively mobilized capacity to act. Drawing on a corpus of 18 interviews with adult immigrant small business owners in the United States, th…
Orienting to “Being Ordinary”: The (Re)construction of Hegemonic Ideologies in Interactions Among Adult Immigrant Learners of English
This article investigates the construction and maintenance of ideologies regarding the legitimacy of English as the dominant language in the United States in interactions involving adult immigrant learners of English. As both the researcher and these students' English as second language (ESL) instructor, I am a participant in the ESL classroom and interview conversations that are analyzed in this study. In my analysis, I consider how these adult …
Advanced language learning: The contribution of Halliday and Vygotsky
Cognitive and Sociocultural Perspectives: Two Parallel SLA Worlds
Looking back at the past 15 years in the field of second language acquisition (SLA), the authors select and discuss several important developments. One is the impact of various sociocultural perspectives such as Vygotskian sociocultural theory, language socialization, learning as changing participation in situated practices, Bakhtin and the dialogic perspective, and critical theory. Related to the arrival of these perspectives, the SLA field has …
Learning as Changing Participation: Discourse Roles in ESL Writing Conferences
This study investigates the acquisition of an unfamiliar discursive practice by an adult Vietnamese learner of English. The practice is revision talk in weekly English as a Second Language (ESL) writing conferences between the student and his ESL writing instructor. This research adopts the interactional competence framework for understanding the interactional architecture and participation framework of the practice. It also draws on the theory o…
Accuracy in Dry Bone Diagnosis: A Comment on Palaeopathological Methods
The objectives of palaeopathological research include: (i) diagnosis of specific diseases in archaeological human remains; (ii) analysis of the impact of various diseases in human populations through time and space; and (iii) clarification of evolutionary interactions between humans and disease. Basic to all these objectives is the need for accuracy in diagnosing diseases in archaeological human remains. Tests of diagnostic accuracy made during w…
Bladder cancer risk among auto and truck mechanics and chemically related occupations
Male participants in the NCI National Bladder Cancer study were evaluated for risks in auto and truck mechanic and in chemically related exposure occupations compared with those who had never worked in these areas. In nonsmokers the adjusted rate ratios (RR) for mechanics equalled 1.33, (95% CI 0.77, 2.31). The adjusted RR in the nonsmoker chemically related group was 1.53 (95% CI 1.13, 2.07). Duration of exposure as a mechanic was not clearly as…
Language teacher agency, emotion labor and emotional rewards in tertiary-level English language programs
Cognitive and Sociocultural Perspectives: Two Parallel SLA Worlds
Looking back at the past 15 years in the field of second language acquisition (SLA), the authors select and discuss several important developments. One is the impact of various sociocultural perspectives such as Vygotskian sociocultural theory, language socialization, learning as changing participation in situated practices, Bakhtin and the dialogic perspective, and critical theory. Related to the arrival of these perspectives, the SLA field has …
An Exploration of Language Teacher Reflection, Emotion Labor, and Emotional Capital
In this article the researchers explore the notion of emotional capital in relation to language teachers’ emotion labor and the role of reflection in understanding their emotional experiences. They draw on interview narratives with teachers ( N = 25) working in higher education institutions in the United States and United Kingdom. During these interview conversations, the researchers elicited accounts of teachers’ emotionally charged experiences …
The ideology of learner agency and the neoliberal self
This paper compares how the neoliberal self and the agentive language learner self have been conceptualized in the scholarly literature. It shows that both selves are construed as self‐regulating and free to choose, but that they are treated very differently in terms of origin or essence. In discussing the apparent contradiction between the neoliberal self as an ideological effect and the agentive self as naturally agentive, the paper proposes a …
Relationality in language teacher emotion regulation: Regulating emotions through, with and for others
Although previous research has shown that teaching is replete with emotion (Zembylas, 2004) and that emotion regulation should be viewed as a key teacher competence (Brackett, Palomera, Mojsa-Kaja, Reyes, & Salovey, 2010; Gkonou & Mercer, 2017), there is still much that we do not know about how such regulation is performed in teachers’ day-to-day teaching practice. In this article, we explore the nature of emotion regulation among 50 language tea…
Agency, language learning, and multilingual spaces
This article explores the notion of agency in language learning and use as discursively, historically, and socially mediated. It further explores how agency can be understood as variously enabled and constrained as individuals move from one cultural, linguistic, and/or geographical space to another. These explorations focus on how agency is constituted in language and interaction, and how the ‘agency of spaces’ is both constituted by such interac…
Agency in the Making: Adult Immigrants' Accounts of Language Learning and Work
This article considers language learner agency from a poststructuralist perspective, focusing on how agency is discursively constituted as individuals position themselves and are positioned as (potential) agents within ideologically defined spaces. As such, I regard agency as inherently unstable and as a discursively mobilized capacity to act. Drawing on a corpus of 18 interviews with adult immigrant small business owners in the United States, th…
Investigating Entanglements in Experienced Language Teachers’ Sense of Belonging and What Belonging Does
The vast body of research on language teacher identity from the past two decades along with more recent research on language teacher emotions has shown that identity and emotions are mutually shaping facets of language teachers’ professional lives. (Un)belonging is a key link between teacher identity and emotions in that the feeling of belonging typically corresponds to insider identities and unbelonging with peripheral or outsider status. Howeve…
Positioning selves, doing relational work and constructing identities in interview talk
This article draws on positioning theory and uses Bamberg’s (2005) three-level analytic approach to analyze how identity construction and relational work implicate the other and are co-constitutive processes in local interactions. To that end, it examines a sequence of excerpts taken from an interview involving the author and a Vietnamese woman and analyzes the co-constructed positioning of self and other that developed over the course of the int…
Bladder cancer risk among auto and truck mechanics and chemically related occupations
Male participants in the NCI National Bladder Cancer study were evaluated for risks in auto and truck mechanic and in chemically related exposure occupations compared with those who had never worked in these areas. In nonsmokers the adjusted rate ratios (RR) for mechanics equalled 1.33, (95% CI 0.77, 2.31). The adjusted RR in the nonsmoker chemically related group was 1.53 (95% CI 1.13, 2.07). Duration of exposure as a mechanic was not clearly as…
Bladder cancer risk among auto and truck mechanics and chemically related occupations
Male participants in the NCI National Bladder Cancer study were evaluated for risks in auto and truck mechanic and in chemically related exposure occupations compared with those who had never worked in these areas. In nonsmokers the adjusted rate ratios (RR) for mechanics equalled 1.33, (95% CI 0.77, 2.31). The adjusted RR in the nonsmoker chemically related group was 1.53 (95% CI 1.13, 2.07). Duration of exposure as a mechanic was not clearly as…
Accuracy in Dry Bone Diagnosis: A Comment on Palaeopathological Methods
The objectives of palaeopathological research include: (i) diagnosis of specific diseases in archaeological human remains; (ii) analysis of the impact of various diseases in human populations through time and space; and (iii) clarification of evolutionary interactions between humans and disease. Basic to all these objectives is the need for accuracy in diagnosing diseases in archaeological human remains. Tests of diagnostic accuracy made during w…
Learning as Changing Participation: Discourse Roles in ESL Writing Conferences
This study investigates the acquisition of an unfamiliar discursive practice by an adult Vietnamese learner of English. The practice is revision talk in weekly English as a Second Language (ESL) writing conferences between the student and his ESL writing instructor. This research adopts the interactional competence framework for understanding the interactional architecture and participation framework of the practice. It also draws on the theory o…
Cognitive and Sociocultural Perspectives: Two Parallel SLA Worlds
Looking back at the past 15 years in the field of second language acquisition (SLA), the authors select and discuss several important developments. One is the impact of various sociocultural perspectives such as Vygotskian sociocultural theory, language socialization, learning as changing participation in situated practices, Bakhtin and the dialogic perspective, and critical theory. Related to the arrival of these perspectives, the SLA field has …
Orienting to “Being Ordinary”: The (Re)construction of Hegemonic Ideologies in Interactions Among Adult Immigrant Learners of English
This article investigates the construction and maintenance of ideologies regarding the legitimacy of English as the dominant language in the United States in interactions involving adult immigrant learners of English. As both the researcher and these students' English as second language (ESL) instructor, I am a participant in the ESL classroom and interview conversations that are analyzed in this study. In my analysis, I consider how these adult …
Advanced language learning: The contribution of Halliday and Vygotsky
Agency in the Making: Adult Immigrants' Accounts of Language Learning and Work
This article considers language learner agency from a poststructuralist perspective, focusing on how agency is discursively constituted as individuals position themselves and are positioned as (potential) agents within ideologically defined spaces. As such, I regard agency as inherently unstable and as a discursively mobilized capacity to act. Drawing on a corpus of 18 interviews with adult immigrant small business owners in the United States, th…
Indeterminacy and Interview Research: Co-constructing Ambiguity and Clarity in Interviews with an Adult Immigrant Learner of English†
This article adopts a social constructionist approach in maintaining that indeterminacy of meaning is an unavoidable aspect of interview research. It uses positioning analysis to examine how subject positions and contingently constructed meanings are produced in interview interactions. The analysis focuses on excerpts from a series of three interviews with a Chinese-born immigrant to the US in which the interviewee responds to questions asking wh…
Agency, language learning, and multilingual spaces
This article explores the notion of agency in language learning and use as discursively, historically, and socially mediated. It further explores how agency can be understood as variously enabled and constrained as individuals move from one cultural, linguistic, and/or geographical space to another. These explorations focus on how agency is constituted in language and interaction, and how the ‘agency of spaces’ is both constituted by such interac…
Agency, language learning, and multilingual spaces
Positioning selves, doing relational work and constructing identities in interview talk
This article draws on positioning theory and uses Bamberg’s (2005) three-level analytic approach to analyze how identity construction and relational work implicate the other and are co-constitutive processes in local interactions. To that end, it examines a sequence of excerpts taken from an interview involving the author and a Vietnamese woman and analyzes the co-constructed positioning of self and other that developed over the course of the int…
Reconstructing gender ideologies of English loanwords in Chinese
The ideology of learner agency and the neoliberal self
This paper compares how the neoliberal self and the agentive language learner self have been conceptualized in the scholarly literature. It shows that both selves are construed as self‐regulating and free to choose, but that they are treated very differently in terms of origin or essence. In discussing the apparent contradiction between the neoliberal self as an ideological effect and the agentive self as naturally agentive, the paper proposes a …
Re-Examining and Re-Envisioning Criticality in Language Studies: Theories and Praxis
As critical perspectives in language studies have gained legitimacy and even mainstream status in applied linguistics, it is necessary to re-examine the meaning of criticality in language studies and to re-envision criticality for further development. The authors explore criticality from several theoretical perspectives as well as from the notion of praxis. They review three major theoretical threads—namely, postmodernist constructionism includin…
Language teacher agency, emotion labor and emotional rewards in tertiary-level English language programs
Caring and emotional labour: Language teachers’ engagement with anxious learners in private language school classrooms
This study examines how a group of eight teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) in Greece discuss their efforts to address their students’ language anxiety (LA). We found that in most cases, these teachers’ efforts are motivated by an ethic of care (Noddings, 1988, 2005, 2013) in which they seek to construct positive relationships with students in order to help mitigate their students’ LA. Though desirable, such efforts often result in ‘…
An Exploration of Language Teacher Reflection, Emotion Labor, and Emotional Capital
In this article the researchers explore the notion of emotional capital in relation to language teachers’ emotion labor and the role of reflection in understanding their emotional experiences. They draw on interview narratives with teachers ( N = 25) working in higher education institutions in the United States and United Kingdom. During these interview conversations, the researchers elicited accounts of teachers’ emotionally charged experiences …
Exploring Teacher Caring as a “Happy Object” in Language Teacher Accounts of Happiness
This article explores how the language teachers in our study associated particular teaching experiences with feeling happy in qualitative interview accounts. Adopting a critical poststructural orientation, it uses the concept of sticky objects (Ahmed 2010; Benesch 2017) to explore how contexts, social discourses, relationships and emotional norms are entangled in and shape emotions such as happiness. More particularly, it adopts Ahmed’s (2010) no…
Commentary: Understanding Emotions in EMI Institutions through Attending to Context, History, and Ideology
Relationality in language teacher emotion regulation: Regulating emotions through, with and for others
Although previous research has shown that teaching is replete with emotion (Zembylas, 2004) and that emotion regulation should be viewed as a key teacher competence (Brackett, Palomera, Mojsa-Kaja, Reyes, & Salovey, 2010; Gkonou & Mercer, 2017), there is still much that we do not know about how such regulation is performed in teachers’ day-to-day teaching practice. In this article, we explore the nature of emotion regulation among 50 language tea…
Commentary: Exploring “the pinch” of emotion labor in language teacher research
This brief Commentary examines how the nine articles in the Special Issue on Second Language Teacher Emotion Labor build on sociologist Arlie Hochschild's conceptualization of emotional labor as well as more recent poststructuralist orientations to language teacher emotion labor by scholars in applied linguistics. To that end, it focuses on two common themes that run throughout these articles: the effects of feeling rules on language teachers and…
Investigating Entanglements in Experienced Language Teachers’ Sense of Belonging and What Belonging Does
The vast body of research on language teacher identity from the past two decades along with more recent research on language teacher emotions has shown that identity and emotions are mutually shaping facets of language teachers’ professional lives. (Un)belonging is a key link between teacher identity and emotions in that the feeling of belonging typically corresponds to insider identities and unbelonging with peripheral or outsider status. Howeve…
Language Program Administrators' Accounts of Nurturing Teacher Belonging and its Emotional Effects
Feeling a sense of belonging is increasingly regarded as vital for language teacher wellbeing and for determining whether they want to become teachers and/or remain in the field. However, we understand very little about how or whether the administrators who directly supervise them understand the significance of belonging or actively work to nurture it among teachers. This study draws on interview and questionnaire data provided by 30 Language Pro…
Emotions and Language Education
In this article, we discuss research on emotions and language education with a particular focus on articles published in TESOL Quarterly between 2010 and 2024, in celebration of the journal's 60th anniversary. Given that this is the first time that a TESOL Quarterly anniversary issue has highlighted emergent and prominent trends in research related to emotions in language education, we begin our discussion by briefly outlining the background of t…
Psychology (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Linguistics (14 works) · EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning (12 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (12 works) · Social Psychology (12 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Ideology (8 works)