Professional Biography
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.
