This study describes how members of a transnational social network of Mexican bilinguals living in Chicago manipulate their language on online social media to facilitate and maintain close connections across borders. Using a discourse-centered online ethnographic approach, I examine conversations posted on members' Facebook walls and the contexts in which the discourses are formed. I argue that members of this transnational social network engage in the use of deterritorialized discourse to create chronotopes; that is, through discourse, members connect temporal and spatial relationships and form them into a single constructed context. These chronotopes help members recontextualize Facebook as a unique transnational social place that connects families and allows for the continuation of cultural practices that maintain their transnationalism. This study sheds light on the use of linguistic resources and modes of communication to examine how individuals construct imagined experiences within a real intimate community in the deterritorialized space of online social media.

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A majority of research on mobile-assisted language learning focuses on traditional English language learners: thus, little attention has been paid to older adult learners. The purpose of the study is to explore the learning experiences of Chinese older adults using the free and popular English learning mobile apps, Duolingo/Hello English, Baicizhan, and Liulishuo, in a self-directed learning (SDL) context. A 17-week sequential mixed-methods study was designed. 55 older adults from age 45 to 85 participated. The informed grounded theory was used and Saldana's coding techniques for qualitative analysis. Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and paired sample t-tests. Findings demonstrate that older adults persisted in learning using mobile apps for 17 weeks and increased their vocabulary significantly. Finally, a transformational learning model called MISAPP was created based on the empirical data and the SDL theory.

This article presents a case study with two transnational Mexican youth that came from a larger study of the digital media practices of young people in an urban high school. Our study takes a chronotopic (Bakhtin, 1981) lens to understand the youths' accounts of their digital communication. Analysis of interviews and observations with the youth when they described their online activities show that the youth employed digital literacies to vicariously "live" experiences and keep up with life away from their families in Mexico. The youth situated their activities in three distinct but dialogical chronotopes (family, hometown, and transborder) to create transnational connections and make sense of who they are. They drew on digital artifacts to narrate themselves, developed familial, cultural, and political knowledge, and expanded their linguistic repertoires in the process. The findings have implications for TESOL classrooms that seek to build on the border-crossing experiences and linguistic and multimodal resources of young people in their learning. We discuss how youths' digital practices and embedded artifacts serve to construct multiple contexts and vantage points for developing their transnational identities and knowledge, and how these practices could be recognized as agentic forms of narrative production and learning in the classroom.

This article explores how younger members of a multigenerational social network of transnational Mexicans of ranchero background construct their ethnic identity both in offline and online contexts. By using traditional ethnography and discourse-centered online ethnography (DCOE), this study found that members of this network use four emic criteria (language, color, transnationality, and display of culture) to construct their ethnic identity as Mexican. In the online context, members use these criteria to challenge each other's degree of Mexicanness. By challenging other members' degree of Mexicanness, members are indirectly re-constructing their social order, not based on age and gender but based on a hierarchy that conforms to a place of influence in the network grounded in centrality, which correlates to their perceived degrees of Mexicanness. Facebook serves as a catalyst for change, as it allows members to interact in more direct ways, slowly influencing interactions carried out in offline contexts.