My research area includes of First-Year Composition, cross-cultural communication and technology design, multicultural and multilingual composition, contact zone, and technological literacy. My research investigates how students from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds perceive Learning Management Systems (LMS) that are used in writing classrooms. I also analyze interface design by writing students and its relationship to student agency and invention in their digital writing and research in a cross-cultural digital contact zone situation of First-Year Composition (FYC) in US universities. I have published a number of journal articles and book chapters.

In my dissertation, “Inviting Citizen Designers to Design Learning Management System (LMS) Interfaces for Student Agency in a Cross-Cultural Digital Contact Zone,” I assess how Citizen Designers, writing students from periphery cultural and linguistic backgrounds at a public university, perceive digital interfaces of LMS such as Blackboard Learn and what type of interface they like to see or design. Since these writing students from periphery cultural and linguistic backgrounds are becoming majority in many academic disciplines, I seek to understand whether these LMS designs should remain as they are now or they should be changed according to the student body and their ways of life in order to enhance user activities in these platforms. The findings of my research, some of which I presented at the 65^th Convention of Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in Indianapolis, significantly complicate the conventional assumption on technology design in a cross-cultural digital contact zone where students with asymmetrical power dynamics come together for various purposes including cross-cultural collaboration. Previous studies have argued that interfaces should be designed in order to make them inclusive platforms that don’t exclude any user on the basis of their social, cultural, linguistic, and racial backgrounds to name just a few; this study goes beyond the notion of interfaces as inclusive platforms and argues for high level customization user opportunities to its users from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Drawing on the works of scholars like Selfe & Selfe (1994), Wysocki and Jasken (2004), Selber (2004), Jonson- Eilola (2004), Spinuzzi (2009), Rosinski & Squire (2009), Carpenter (2009), Carnegie (2009), and Sun (2012), I illustrate how the demand for higher level of interaction with the LMS systems can be fulfilled by inviting these writing students from periphery cultural and linguistic backgrounds to the interface design of these platforms since their cultural and linguistics norms and values don’t seem to be acknowledged in the current design of these LMS interfaces. I successfully defended my dissertation on Dec. 24, 2014. I intend to develop my dissertation into a book length project as it has practical value for WPA, undergraduate/graduate writing programs, and software designers of these LMS. I received a Baker-Hernandez Graduate Program Grant in June 2012 for the empirical study I conducted as a part of my research, and I won First Annual First-Year Composition (FYC) Award for Dissertations because of this study’s contribution to the field.