Her work specializes in second language acquisition, language pedagogy, and intercultural communication manifested in language teaching, program building and teacher training. She is writing a book, "A Pedagogy of Target Culture Expectation," and co-editing a volume forthcoming from Routledge, "Third Space and Chinese Pedagogy: Negotiating Intentions and Expectations in Another Culture."
She has directed intensive study abroad Chinese programs including the Critical Language Scholarship program, and has received several awards for her projects from the U.S. Chinese Language Teachers Association, Five Colleges of Ohio Consortium, National Federation of Modern Language Teachers' Association and National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages. From 2016 to 2019, she held an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellowship and served as a visiting assistant professor of Chinese at Oberlin College.
Zhang has an M.A. and a Ph.D. in East Asian languages and literature in Chinese language pedagogy from Ohio State University.