She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Southern California in International Education, specializing in second language vocabulary acquisition, especially those areas relating to learner-centered instruction and English for academic purposes. Her publications have appeared in edited collections and in a variety of journals including TESOL Quarterly and Studies in Second Language Acquisition. Her research interests include incremental word learning, derivational knowledge, vocabulary knowledge, and high school writing success. She regularly teaches graduate courses on such topics as second language acquisition, culture, vocabulary and the fundamentals of TESOL, and is a frequent invited speaker on topics related to vocabulary teaching and learning.