My research spans a number of areas of applied linguistics including language education, language policy and planning and discourse analysis. Much of my work has focused on the relationship between intercultural understanding and language teaching and learning and the ways that learning a foreign language can promote intercultural capabilities. I am especially interested in understanding how classroom practices that look at the interrelationships between language and culture in the processes of making, communicating and interpreting meanings can enhance language education. I am also interested in how societies and institutions plan language education and what the consequences of this are teachers, students and the society at large.

My educational background is in descriptive and applied linguistics and I completed my PhD in Norman French dialects in the Department of French at the University of Melbourne. Since then the focus of my work has mainly been in applied linguistics. Before coming to the University of Warwick in 2016, I worked at a number of universities in Australia teaching in both linguistics and applied linguistics. In 1999, I was one of the founding editors of the journal Current Issues in Language Planning, and since 2014 I have been the Executive Editor.