PhD Students

Manoucheka Belfort

Manoucheka Belfort is a doctoral student in the Second Language Education program. Her research examines investment and engagement in foreign/second language education and how learners' and instructors' lived experiences influence their learning and teaching processes. She is interested in qualitative research methods and narrative inquiry in particular. Her work seeks to illuminate how classroom practices and broader institutional conditions impact the language acquisition process, and her aim is to support equitable and meaningful language learning and teaching. She earned her MA in French and Applied Linguistics from Georgia State University. Before joining FSU, Manoucheka taught French and English as additional languages in community, secondary, and postsecondary settings in the U.S. and France.

Ziyu Jiang

Ziyu Jiang is a doctoral student in the Second Language Education program. Her research interests include emotion, well-being, identity (re)construction, and investment among language teachers and learners, with a particular focus on transnational and multilingual teachers and students. She is also interested in critical language pedagogies and broader issues of equity and social justice in language education. Methodologically, she uses qualitative research approaches, such as phenomenology, narrative inquiry, discourse and conversation analysis. Outside of academic life, she enjoys hiking, working on puzzles, and building lego sets. She earned her MA in TESL from The Pennsylvania State University. Before joining FSU, she taught EAP writing courses to multilingual undergraduate students, foundational English skills to adult immigrant learners, and mainstream college composition courses to undergraduate students in the U.S.