[4] Schleppegrell is known for the SFL-based literacy practices she has continuously helped to develop for multilingual and English language learners throughout her decades long career, which she began as an educational specialist before transitioning to the field of applied linguistics.
[10] Schleppegrell's dissertation entitled, "Functions of because in spoken discourse" demonstrates a return to her early career interests as interviews of elementary school students formed the corpus of her research data.
[2] After joining the faculty at the University of Michigan, Schleppegrell published Reading in Secondary Content Areas: A Language-Based Pedagogy with Luciana de Oliveira and Focus on Grammar and Meaning with Zhihui Fang, two books that offer both theoretical explanations and practical approaches for the development of critical literacy in a K-12 setting.
[16] Published in 2004, this book was a timely response to Lily Wong Fillmore and Catherine E. Snow's 2002 suggestion that researchers provide teachers with more explicit knowledge about academic language.
[5][16] In response to this problem, Schleppegrell advocates for explicit language instruction across all academic subjects that provides students with an understanding of how texts create meaning through a combination genre-related conventions and linguistic choices made by the author or speaker.