M'Balia Thomas

M'Balia Thomas teaches courses in the English undergraduate, MATESL graduate, and SLAT PhD programs. She is a Critical Applied Linguist with a focus on ideologies about language, language learning and language users. Her work has included arts-based research that examines what popular cultural texts (the systematic language patterns within these texts) can reveal about teaching, learning, and educational spaces. In this work, she has drawn upon a variety of qualitative research methods, including thematic, discourse, conversation, narrative, rhetorical-stylistics, text world theory, and corpus-based analyses. Through the study of written/spoken language—including the language of fictional learners and teachers—her work demonstrates that it is possible to gain relevant insight into learning, teaching, and assessment and the ideologies that shape and impede each.

 

More recently, her work has shifted towards engagement in the Digital Humanities. Through her TILAR Lab, she works to recover, showcase, and liberate from the depths of newspapers, broadcast and social media the testimonial injustices that occur to marginalized populations–in particular, those considered “non native” and “non standard" speakers of American English. This research draws upon theories and methodological tools from across related language fields to uncover the injustices (and the ideologies that underlie them) and highlight the everyday creativity taken up to resist and address these injustices.