Her research focus lies in the intersection among psychology, language learning and teaching. She is especially interested in how the acquisitional processes of Chinese as a second language can be explained from a psychology perspective. Recently, her research interests have expanded into multilingual identities of learners and foreign language teacher education.

Chen has a B.A. in teaching Chinese to speakers of other languages and a M.A. in linguistics and applied linguistics from Beijing Language and Culture University, and a Ph.D. in second language acquisition, specializing in speech processing and phonetics, from the University of Iowa. She has been teaching and tutoring Chinese at universities and summer intensive programs since 2011.