My research focuses on instructed adult second language acquisition (SLA) with specific interest in curricular models that support the longitudinal nature of second language development. At the outset of my career I focused on the feasibility and efficacy of extensive and extended reading in beginning classrooms as way to integrate increased textuality into lower-level instruction. Then, while at Georgetown University I expanded the scope of my research by examining multi-year, text-based curricular frameworks for facilitating language development. Serving as the research context for this work was the groundbreaking literacy-oriented and genre-based curriculum in the German Department at Georgetown. To investigate language development in this curricular setting, my colleagues and I found Systemic Functional Linguistics to be an especially helpful theoretical framework, and I have since conducted functionally oriented analyses of longitudinal writing data to ascertain the trajectory toward and the characteristics of advanced second language writing. Because the writing in such a context draws so heavily from textual sources, I also am interested in the phenomenon among second language learners of textual borrowing and its role in language development. The insights into the language learning process gained from this research have figured heavily in the reform efforts of the undergraduate curriculum in the German Studies Department at Emory. Most recently, and in conjunction with Emory’s summer study abroad program in Vienna, Austria, I have begun researching the language learning opportunities in the linguistic landscape. Twice now students have conducted field-based research on the linguistic landscape of Vienna with a particular eye toward how the city's multiculturalism is manifested (or not) in publicly displayed language. Not only have these projects helped students gain a new perspective into the city’s multicultural and multilingual landscape, but they also have had to grapple with fundamental questions about applied linguistics research methodology. Two articles on this topic, one in English in an edited volume and one in German in Der Deutschunterricht, have appeared in print, and I have co-edited two separate volumes on the topic of language learning in the linguistic landscape with David Malinowski (San Jose State University) and Sébastien Dubreil (Carnegie Mellon University). One of the volumes appeared with Springer in 2020, and the other was published in 2023 as an open educational resource with Springer. A complete list of recent scholarship can be found on the "publications" and "presentations" pages, and more information about my current ongoing research can be found on the “projects” page.

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