This thesis explores cultural identity negotiation among American born Chinese (ABC) college students. Specifically analyzing their communication patterns within the classroom, the author illuminates how ABC students negotiate their multicultural identities through emergent dialectical tensions and patterns of praxis.

Derived and adapted from Baxter and Montgomery's (1996) work, emergent dialectics, as well as patterns of praxis emerge in this thesis. The five most dominant dialects are: advantages/limitations (of bilingualism), sufficiency/insufficiency (within cultural communities), conformity to/defiance against (the norm), fulfillment/failure (of expectations), and familial obligations/sense of independence. The responses to these dialectical tensions, or patterns of praxis, are: helping, restricting, (re)appropriating, balancing, and prioritizing. These dialectics and patterns of praxis are shaped inductively through participant interviews and supported by autoethnographic accounts.

The implications for this thesis reveal that every individual in the classroom plays a part in constructing and reconstructing these dialectics. Social interactions within the classroom always consist of emergent tensions; therefore, we are all agents for social change.