This dissertation is a qualitative case study exploring the process of culture learning in a Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) classroom. Guided by a socioculturally based theoretical perspective and adopting the stance of the National Standards, which says that language students "cannot truly master the language until they have also mastered the cultural contexts in which the language occurs" (1996, p. 27), this study describes how culture learning is tied to class practices aimed at developing students' language proficiency by exploring how culture and language are integrated in spoken discourse and interactions in the classroom. The research questions of the study focus on both the instructor's and the students' perspectives towards the interrelationship between language learning and culture learning and their actual practices in the dynamic, complex, and emerging speech community of classroom contexts. Through analysis of student questionnaires, classroom observations, instructor interview, and stimulated-recall sessions with students, this study examines the contexts of culture learning, illustrates how language classroom contexts shape and are shaped by all the class members, including both the instructor and the students, and describes how the classroom spoken discourse in the current advanced-level undergraduate CFL course provides opportunities for culture learning and how culture learning actually happens in this language classroom. The findings suggest that as the instructor and the students interact in the language classroom, it is not so much the particular pieces of cultural and linguistic information under discussion that delineate the actual culture learning process, but rather the active exchanges and sometimes disagreements between the instructor and the students that provide opportunities for interactive cultural dialogues and discussions. In other words, cultural knowledge and understanding are situated in actual contexts of language use. Language learning is also embedded in the same interactive and collaborative discussion of texts. By exploring the complexity of the culture learning process in the language classroom setting, this study adds theoretical and pedagogical support to the premise that culture learning should be an integral part of language instruction at different levels throughout the language curriculum.

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Current teacher education research calls for investigation of the "missing paradigm," the connection between teachers' conceptions of knowledge and learning and their instructional practices. This call has been heeded in the scholarship on personal epistemology that reveals the role of knowledge in learning and instruction within and across various socio-cultural contexts. This study extends the work on the relationship between teachers' personal epistemologies and instructional practices to a previously unexamined population: international and U.S. Teaching Assistants (TAs). Employing a two-phase explanatory mixed methods approach, this study examines the relationship between personal epistemologies and instructional practices of two teaching assistant (TA) groups, international and U.S.-born, in U.S. university contexts. In the first phase of the study, an epistemological beliefs survey was conducted with two groups of TAs, 106 international and 50 U.S.-born, at four large research universities in the Mid-Atlantic States. Their answers were analyzed with a focus on the relationship between group variables and seven dimensions of personal epistemologies. Building on the initial quantitative study results, in the second phase, a qualitative case study was carried out to investigate the relationship between epistemic positions and teaching practices for four TAs representing international and domestic TA groups within two academic disciplines at a public research university in Philadelphia, PA. Forty four undergraduate student data from focus-group interviews and surveys also were collected to examine the relationship between TAs' instructional practices and student opinions about their teaching. The quantitative results showed a significant group difference in the knowledge beliefs domain and the relational views domain (p < .001). In general, ITAs held a higher degree in their beliefs about certainty of knowledge than did US TAs. In addition, US TAs assumed a closer relationship with their students than did the ITAs, while unlike common assumptions, US TAs assumed a higher degree of status differentiation from students than did ITAs. The findings of the qualitative phase of the study revealed that the relationship between TAs' epistemic positions and instructional practices was not fully consistent. In the case of the US TAs, much of the inconsistency of the relationship is explained by the lack of pedagogical knowledge and pedagogic skills, which would enable them to exercise control over the types of instructional approaches that they wanted to implement at a discourse level in class. ITAs' instructional practices were more closely aligned with learning strategies that they had developed through educational experiences in their home countries and with their generalized assumptions about attitudes of U.S. students toward learning. The results also show that ITAs are as qualified and competent instructors in teaching of undergraduate students as US TAs are, and that ITAs' teacher-centered approaches are well received by the students who expect explanation, guidance, direction, and reinforcement on the part of their instructors. In addition, the analysis of TAs' epistemic positions revealed domain specificity as well as group differences to be major compounding factors affecting TAs' professed epistemologies. Pedagogic as well as theoretical implications of the study are discussed. / CITE/Language Arts