Biography

Cheer is a PhD candidate in Chinese Linguistics at UCLA and is pursuing a Graduate Certificate in Writing Pedagogy. Her research examines how language use shapes and is shaped by social relationships in everyday conversation. Her work has appeared in Chinese as a Second Language (https://benjamins.com/catalog/csl.00062.wu). She has taught Mandarin, Cantonese, and ESL in university and community settings. Her research aims to make interactional practices explicit for language teaching and intercultural communication.

She studies how language use shapes and is shaped by social relationships in everyday conversation. Using conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, my dissertation examines how listener responses (e.g., continuers, questions, affective displays) are sequentially organized and differ between interactions among strangers and friends. Her work aims to make these interactional practices explicit for applications in language teaching and intercultural communication.