Christina Frei specializes in constructivist curriculum design, intercultural communication, and diverse applications of technology for teaching and learning world languages and cultures. She co-authored a textbook for introductory/intermediate German language and culture: Augenblicke German through Film, Media and Texts, 2E, 2023.

She received two national teaching awards recognizing her contributions to Language and Teacher Education: The 2017 AATG Outstanding German Educator Award and the 2017 ACTFL-NYSAFLT Anthony Papalia Award for Excellence in Teacher Education, and in 2010 she received the SAS Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching by Affiliated Faculty.

In her capacity as Executive Director of Language Instruction for the School of Arts & Sciences, she oversees language Instruction and the language education community across SAS, The Wharton Business School/Lauder Institute MBA/MA program, College of Liberal and Professional Studies (LPS), The Educational Linguistics Division of The Graduate School of Education and The School of Engineering and Applied Science. Thus, she is involved in sustained quality of language and culture instruction for more than 42 languages taught at Penn. 

Frei also chairs the Penn Language Center, home of many less commonly taught languages at Penn. In her role as educational leader she secured several grants: NEH, Fulbright and STARTALK. With the support of the Department of Education and the Institute for International Education (IIE), Frei conceptualizes and directs the Fulbright pre-semester orientation for foreign language teaching assistants. The PLC, secured a NEH grant for the EPIC initiative: Educational Partnerships with Indigenous Communities in collaboration with the late Dr. Timothy Powell. The grant aims to collaborate with tribal scholars and language educators to create sustained approaches to the teaching of language and culture based on indigenous knowledge systems.

Furthermore, Frei designed and implemented the curriculum of the language program at the Freie Universität Berlin international Summer and Winter University (FUBiS), the department's summer study-abroad venue and contributes regularly to curricular innovations at Penn's College of Liberal and Professional Studies and the Middlebury Language School.

Projects also include research in the affordances and efficacy of theme-based and constructivist curricular design for post-secondary language education. See her co-authored articles “Teaching Perspectives: Intercultural Development at All Levels” in The Language Educator, Jan/Feb 2018 and "Implications of the AP World Language Curriculum for University Language Programs" in AAUSC Volume 17, 2016.