She earned her M.A. in TESOL from Michigan State University and her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from Georgetown University. Her research interests include psycholinguistic approaches to second language acquisition, classroom-based acquisition research, usage-based approaches to acquisition, and task-based language teaching. She delivered a keynote speech at the 2014 Second Language Studies Symposium titled Using structural priming tasks in L2 classrooms, and kindly spared some time for this interview after her keynote address.