Dr Yap joined academic life as a senior lecturer in Faculty Languages and Linguistics at the Universiti Malaya in 2016. She was a Programme coordinator of the Chinese Programme at the Department of Malaysian Languages and Applied Linguistics (2017-2018). She completed her Doctoral programme (Applied Linguistics) at the Minzu University of China, Beijing; her Masters of Modern Languages and Linguistics; BA (Chinese Language Studies) and Dip. Education (Chinese Pedagogy) at the Universiti Malaya. Her main research interests are Global Chinese in general, Teaching Chinese as a Second language (CSL) in particular, attitudes, motivations and identities towards and among CSL learners, and the implications of the spread of the Chinese Language. Her teaching interests are broadly within Global Chinese, such as Chinese Specific Purpose (CSP) in Mass Media, Chinese Text Analysis, Chinese Research Methodology and Chinese Language Structure. She is appointed chairperson by the Educational Resources and Technology Division of the Malaysian Ministry of Education for the revision of the Secondary School Standard Curriculum Textbook(since 2019 till now). 

She especially welcomes proposals for PhD or Master research projects on any aspect of Global Chinese, areas of particular interest include Chinese as a Second language (CSL), Language ideological debates relating to Global Chinese, Intelligibility issues relating to the spread of Chinese Language, Attitudes and Motivation towards CSL, Chinese language Teaching in higher education contexts around the world, Chinese Specific Purpose (CSP) in Mass media, and Chinese language structure-Chinese syntax, especially Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG).