Min-Seok Choi

Examines how multilingual children and families engage in literacy and information practices across homes and informal learning spaces, using multimodal interaction to understand how culturally sustaining environments and emerging technologies shape learning, identity, and participation.

• Rising Star Award, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2026
• Kathy Authement Prouet/BORSF Memorial Endowed Professorship in Education II, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2025–2026
• Emerging Scholar Award, Language and Social Processes SIG, American Educational Research Association, 2022
• Graduate Student Research Award, Division I, American Educational Research Association, 2021

Min-Seok Choi is an assistant professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He received his PhD in Literacy Education from The Ohio State University. Choi studies how children and families make meaning across homes, museums, and other informal learning environments, and how institutions learn to recognize and support the competence they already bring. His research is guided by two broad questions: What counts as literacy, and whose competence becomes visible?

Choi approaches literacy as a social and interactional practice through which people use language, gesture, gaze, images, objects, and technologies to participate in learning and construct identities. Using video-based ethnography, multimodal interaction analysis, and microethnographic discourse analysis, he examines multilingual family literacy in museums, informal learning spaces, and homes. His current and emerging research considers how families use language, translation, writing, digital media, and AI technologies to support children’s learning, creativity, identity development, and multilingual repertoires.

A related strand of his research examines how professionals learn to notice and respond to the diverse ways children and families participate in learning. His Family Learning Observation & Analysis model uses structured observation, analysis, reflection, and planning to help professionals replace deficit assumptions with evidence-based understandings of family competence. Originally developed in teacher education, this model provides a foundation for his future work with librarians, museum educators, and other professionals in public learning institutions.

At Illinois, Choi plans to investigate how libraries, museums, and other community institutions can design programs, professional practices, and family partnerships that more equitably recognize and sustain multilingual participation.

Lee, J., & Choi, M.-S. (in press). Learning to notice quality interactions: Preservice teachers’ sense-making of multilingual family engagement in community-based fieldwork. Early Childhood Education Journal.

Choi, M.-S., Lee, J., & Yu, Y. (in press). A multilingual youth’s translator identity through home literacy activities. Urban Education.

Choi, M.-S., & Lee, J. (2026). Constrained multilingualism in a Korean sojourner family’s museum learning. Language and Intercultural Communication, 26(3), 533–549. https://doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2026.2669780

Choi, M.-S. (2026). A Korean sojourning bilingual child’s diary as translanguaging spaces. Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 25(1), 69–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/15348458.2023.2298393

Choi, M.-S., & Lee, J. (2025). Integrating multilingualism and asset-based pedagogies in literacy education: Preparing preservice teachers through family learning observation. Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 74(1), 396–423. https://doi.org/10.1177/23813377251358188

Choi, M.-S. (2024). Translanguaging space through pointing gestures: Multilingual family literacy at a science museum. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 24(3), 605–632. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687984241276290

Choi, M.-S., & Rhoades, M. (2022). Ways of seeing through desk critique: Intertextuality as a pedagogical tool for learning opportunities. Teaching in Higher Education, 27(7), 923–942. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2020.1759527

Lee, J., & Choi, M.-S. (2026, April 8–12). Disrupting the science of reading through family-based multilingual research: Preservice teachers as ethnographers of literacy [Paper presentation]. American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, CA.

Choi, M.-S., & Lee, J. (2025, December 3–6). Asset-based teaching: Enhancing preservice teachers’ engagement with multilingual literacy practices [Paper presentation]. Literacy Research Association Annual Conference, Las Vegas, NV.

Choi, M.-S. (2025, April 23–27). Translanguaging space through pointing gestures: Multilingual family literacy at a science museum [Paper presentation]. American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, Denver, CO.

Choi, M.-S. (2024, June 25–28). Empowering student voices: How teacher feedback shapes design stories in college studios [Paper presentation]. International Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis Conference, Seoul, South Korea.

Lee, J., & Choi, M.-S. (2024, March 15–19). Nurturing language and literacy practices in a multilingual sojourning family: A collaborative approach [Paper presentation]. American Association for Applied Linguistics Conference, Houston, TX.