For the bulk of her academic career, Brinton worked at the University of California, Los Angeles in a variety of positions, including Associate Director of the UCLA Center for World Languages, Lecturer in Applied Linguistics, and Academic Coordinator of the UCLA ESL Service Courses.
In addition to teaching numerous applied linguistics and TESOL classes, Brinton is an author of books and articles in the field as well as frequent presenter at national and international conferences.
She has made a name for herself in the areas of second language pronunciation pedagogy, content-based instruction (CBI), and general TESOL methodology.
She is also known to the wider applied linguistics community as a long-term editor of The CATESOL Journal, a publication of the California Association of Teachers of English to Speakers to Other Languages.
[5] As a TESOL teacher educator and educational consultant, Brinton has worked across the globe, often as a U.S. Department of State English language specialist, assigned to such locations as Qatar, the U.A.E., Bahrain,[6] Afghanistan, Iraq, Nepal, India, the Philippines,[7][8] China,[9] Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, Singapore, the Republic of South Korea, Taiwan, Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, Paraguay, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria, South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar, Mauritius, Senegal, Mali, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan,[10] Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Syria, Lebanon, Curaçao, and as a visiting faculty member at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand [11] and Toyo University,[12] Kanda University, and Soka University in Japan.