Sultan’s work has led to new ways of thinking about multilingual children’s participation not only with the work of teaching in mainstream classrooms but also math and science assessments. She gained a PhD in December 2009 at the University of Arizona on Teaching/Teacher Education with a minor on Language, Reading and Culture. She has held academic post at Queen’s University Belfast since 2020. Prior to this, she worked for 16 years in Texas, Arizona, New Jersey, and California as a language teacher, teacher educator, and research scientist. She was employed by Educational Testing Service, working as a Research Scientist in the Centre for Validity Research and Programme Lead in the National Assesment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to represent the linguistically and culturally diverse children in subject and teacher assessments. To keep connected to her teaching whilst employed at ETS, Sultan worked concurrently as a lecturer at the College of New Jersey, Rutgers University, Montclair State University, and Holy Family University in New Jersey and greater Philadelphia area.

I research ways to improve educational practices for multilingual immigrant children. My research is guided by the view of language as a resource (rather than a deficiency) for effectively teaching immigrant learners. I have conducted research on the validity and fairness of assessments administered to these learners and their teachers and investigated ways to provide opportunities for immigrant children to demonstrate their funds of knowledge in assessments and classrooms. As the lead author of influential papers, I have argued that the work of teaching in mainstream classrooms draws on specialized knowledge base and skills to attend to multilingual learners' translanguaging practices. Current research project examines the development of formative simulated classroom environments for educating classroom teachers to teach immigrant children. I have over two decades of teaching experience in higher education and foreign/second language contexts with culturally and linguistically diverse groups.

My academic background is in language teaching and teacher education. My research focuses on promoting bilinguals/multilinguals’ participation and engagement in the formal and informal processes of schooling and other sociocultural landscapes through drawing on bilinguals/multilinguals’ linguistic and cultural capital. I am primarily influenced by Bakhtinian and Vygotskyan perspectives to research languaging practices, linguistic and cultural identity formations, and the work of learning to teach students with rich languaging backgrounds and practices.