Description of Research Expertise

Professional Biography
Dr. Wagner has extensive experience in teaching English as a Second Language to non-native speakers of varying proficiency levels and needs. She began her career teaching English at St. Paul’s Convent School in Hong Kong. In the United States, Dr. Wagner has worked with adult immigrants and refugees in a community ESL program, where she was also a member of the advisory board, seeking to improve the instruction and resources that could be offered to members of the community. During her doctoral studies, she taught academic and professional presentation and discussion skills to international graduate students at Teachers College and World Bank scholars at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University. Dr. Wagner also served as a student teaching supervisor, observing novice ESL teachers in their classrooms, and giving feedback on their teaching practice, classroom management, and lesson design. Before coming to GSE, Dr. Wagner taught at Temple University in the GenEd, ESL Certificate, and M.A. TESOL programs.

Research Interests and Current Projects
Dr. Wagner’s primary scholarly interests are qualitative discourse analysis and cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics. In her doctoral dissertation, Dr. Wagner employed a conversation-analytic approach to examine the talk of two disputants and a mediator in a community mediation session. She investigated how a complaint of harassment was verbally constituted, negotiated, and brought to closure. This research has been presented at the international conferences of the American Association for Applied Linguistics and the International Pragmatics Association. Currently, Dr. Wagner is conducting a study on the pragmatic competence of International Teaching Assistants (ITA) and how this impacts students’ perceptions of ITA teaching effectiveness.