Charla Bennaji earned her M.A. in Spanish Linguistics from the University of Houston and her B.A. in Spanish from Thiel College. Before joining CLIC at Rice University, she taught Spanish courses at New College of Florida in Sarasota, FL for twelve years. Charla has taught all levels of Spanish and served as the coordinator for the Spanish Teaching Assistant program. She has been a strong community advocate for childhood and adult literacy.

Charla’s research interests are Second Language Acquisition, teacher training and language pedagogy. As a teacher, she aims to encourage and motivate her students to take control of their language learning.