Before coming to Elizabethtown in 2003, Pennington served as the Powdrill Professor of English Language Acquisition and Head of Language Research Centre at England’s University of Luton. She has also been affiliated with the University of London’s Birkbeck College as a research fellow and the University of Warwick as an external examiner of master’s-level courses, in addition to serving as doctorate examiner at universities such as Oxford (England), Edinburgh (Scotland), Copenhagen (Denmark), and Sydney (Australia). She has also taught in Japan, Indonesia and Spain.

Pennington previously taught and served as an administrator at the University of Pennsylvania, the City University of Hong Kong, the University of Hawaii and the University of California-Santa Barbara. She is the author of a number of books, including "Language in Hong Kong at Century’s End," "The Computer and the Non-Native Writer," and "Phonology in English Language Teaching."

Pennington has received more than 30 grants throughout her academic career, the most recent in 2003 from the European Social Fund to develop English for Excellence, a web-based English language support program. She also received a UK National Teaching Fellowship in 2002, an Educational Testing Service Language Acquisition and Instruction Award in 1998 and a teaching excellence award in 1994-95 from the City University of Hong Kong.

Pennington earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy cum laude with honors from Bryn Mawr College, and master’s and doctoral degrees in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania.