About me

I am a professor in the English Department at Kent State University, where I teach in the BA and MA programs in TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language).  I mainly teach courses on second language reading, second language writing, second/foreign language teaching methods, and second language acquisition.

My research on second language reading has focused on metalinguistic awareness (especially morphological awareness) and lexical inferencing and incidental vocabulary acquisition. I am also interested in how second language readers make use of reading skills developed in their first language (i.e., cross-linguistic transfer). My research on second language writing investigates the development of academic and disciplinary writing abilities.  In particular, I’m interested in how second language writers learn to write discipline-specific genres, and how instruction can be implemented that helps second language writers better understand the expectations of their discipline.  Much of my research in this area uses tools from Systemic Functional Linguistics. I have also done research on preparing teachers to teach linguistically and culturally diverse students.

I am an active member of TESOL International Association. I have served as steering committee member and chair of the Second Language Writing Interest Section (2012-2018) and the Awards Professional Council (2018-2021).

Before coming to Kent State, I was a Post-doctoral Research Associate at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, where I worked with Silvia Pessoa on the CMU-Q Study of Literacy, a 4-year longitudinal study of academic literacy development funded by the Qatar National Research Fund.

I completed my Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition at Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Keiko Koda.  I also hold an MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) from Michigan State University and a BA in Linguistics and German from the University of Michigan.

I lived for a number of years in Japan, where I taught EFL in a variety of contexts including public primary and secondary schools, public and private universities, and a nonprofit education organization.  I am originally from Spring Lake, Michigan.

In my free time, I enjoy traveling, photography, and snorkeling.