In 1992 she obtained her PhD in Applied linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles.

She is co-editor of TESOL Quarterly along with Peter De Costa.

[3][4] Since April 2018 she has been a member-at-large of the American Association for Applied Linguistics.

She is noted for her research synthesis on accuracy measures, published in Language Learning in 1997.

She identified three different types of accuracy measures: (1) holistic scores, (2) error-free units, and (3) error counts.