Paula Garcia received a Master's degree in Applied Linguistics with Specialization in TESL from Northeastern Illinois University in 1991, and a PhD in Applied Linguistics from Northern Arizona University in 2004. Her dissertation, Meaning in academic contexts: A corpus-based study of pragmatic utterances, involved line-by-line analysis of speaker meaning applying an empirically-based taxonomy of speech acts. She has taught graduate-level courses on language testing, language teaching methodology and foundations. Prior to doctoral study, she organized and taught in ESL programs in Chicago and EFL courses in Morocco. She has published articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Bilingual Research Journal and Language Awareness, and has authored and co-authored several book chapters. Her current position involves facilitating research programs at Northern Arizona University.