Introduction
Dongmei Cheng earned a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics with distinction from Northern Arizona University in 2013. Her dissertation investigated student apologies to instructors in university settings. At Texas A&M University-Commerce, Dr. Cheng teaches both face-to-face and online courses in TESOL and Applied Linguistics to graduate and undergraduate students. As a sociolinguist, she is primarily interested in interlanguage pragmatics, especially the acquisition of speech acts from second language learners. As an inter-disciplinary researcher, she is currently working on a book with a sociologist, Jiaming Sun, on China's Generation Gaps. Another research interest of her is second language writing, which resulted from her years of composition teaching to students from different cultural backgrounds and experiences in TA training. As a previous technology coordinator and an instructor of a two-series graduate-level CALL courses, she is also interested in adapting new technological tools in language teaching and teacher training programs. She has presented regularly in TESOL, Applied Linguistics, and second language writing conferences and published her work in a variety of peer-reviewed journals, such as the Journal of Pragmatics, Pragmatics, and TESOL International Journal. She taught a wide range of TESOL, linguistics, and ESL courses at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Northern Arizona University, and Winona State University. She also worked as an English language instructor in different institutions in China and as a translator in the past.
