Dr. Box comes from a family of proud teachers, and she began her teaching career in the college composition classroom at West Chester University. After receiving her master’s degree in English and her high school teaching certification, she began working with English teachers in the Greater Philadelphia area and then in high schools in Paris, France. In all of these classroom experiences, Dr. Box was particularly drawn to exploring the challenges of students who were learning the dominant language of the school and were adjusting to life in a new country. She returned to the United States to pursue a doctorate in Applied Linguistics at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she taught adult ESL and French courses.

Dr. Box facilitates budding educators in examining content-based, language-focused instruction, task-based language teaching, and discourse analytic approaches to multilingual and multicultural settings. She teaches practica for students working in K-12 public schools, as well as those teaching in adult ESL settings. In addition, she consults as an English Language Specialist with the Department of State in implementing English as a Medium of Instruction in international higher education contexts.

Research Interests and Current Projects

Dr. Box’s research utilizes the conversation analytic framework to examine communication, particularly in multilingual educational spaces. She has paid particular attention to ESL classrooms and content-based classrooms with multilingual learners, exploring how and when participation occurs. Her dissertation analyzes the discourse of TESOL supervisors as they balance the many demands of training budding ESL teachers. At times, her passion for social activism takes her outside of the traditional sphere for a classroom researcher. She is presently working with two sets of data: one in a multilingual elementary school classroom, and another in a grassroots political organization that seeks to resist an agenda of exclusion.

Publications

Featured

Talk in Institutions: A Lansi Volume

Selected Publications

DelPrete, D. L., & Box, C. D. (2020). Navigating mother-adolescent daughter (dis)harmonious interactions. In L. Grujicic-Alatriste (Ed.), Language research in multilingual settings: Doing knowledge dissemination at the site of practice. Palgrave MacMillan.

Tadić, N., & Box, C. D. (2019). Attending to the interpersonal and institutional contingencies of interaction in an elementary classroom. In J. K. Hall & S. Looney (Eds.), The embodied work of teaching (pp. 15–36). Multilingual Matters.

Box, C. D., & McKenna, A. (March 2016). A lesson from the field. Secondary accents: A newsletter of the secondary schools interest section. TESOL International, Inc.

Box, C. D. (2015). When and how students take the reins: Specifying student initiatives in tutoring sessions with preschool-aged children. Applied Linguistics Review, 6, 43–62.

Box, C. D., Creider, S. C., & Waring, H. Z. (2013). Talk in the second and foreign language classroom: A review of the literature. Journal of Contemporary Foreign Language Studies, 396(12), 86–97.

Kieffer, M. J., & Box, C. D. (2013). Derivational morphological awareness, academic vocabulary, and reading comprehension in linguistically diverse sixth graders. Learning & Individual Differences, 24, 168–175.

Waring, H. Z., Creider, S. C., & Box, C. D. (2013). Explaining vocabulary in the second language classroom: A conversation analytic account. Learning, Culture, & Social Interaction, 2, 249–264.

Box, C. D. (2012). Embodied (non)participation in a tutoring session. Special Issue of Language and Information Society, 16, 79–108.

Box, C. D. (2011). Microanalyzing discourse in the second and foreign language classrooms: A review of the literature. Working Papers in TESOL & Applied Linguistics, 11(2), 1–14.