From 1984 to 2014 she was Merton Professor of English language at the University of Oxford.
[2][3] Since 1984 she has been Merton Professor of English Language at the University of Oxford.
Other areas of interest include corpus linguistics, language and gender, literacy, and bilingual/immersion education.
She has conducted fieldwork on the language of working class schoolchildren in Scotland, on patterns of bilingualism and language loss among Punjabi speakers in England, on the language of rural and urban schoolchildren in Papua New Guinea, and also in Hawaii.
[10] She was the editor of the fourth volume of The Cambridge History of the English Language.