She received her BA (political acience, '78) and MA (TAFL, '81) from AUC. She received her PhD from Georgetown University in 1995. She has been working in the field of Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language since 1981. She has taught in highly reputable universities in the United States and Europe in addition to the Arabic Language Institute (ALI) where she assumed the position of its director. During her tenure at the ALI, she worked as the co-director of the Center for Arabic Studies Abroad (CASA) . Her publications are in the areas of historical linguistics, language variation and change, and TAFL.