Ferid Chekili undertook his undergraduate studies at the Faculte des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, University of Tunis. He continued his studies with a Maitrise des Lettres Anglaises, and received the prize of the President of the Republic for obtaining first place in Maitrise. He later moved to University College London to pursue a PhD in Linguistics which he completed in 1982.

Immediately after that, he took up a position in the department of English of the Faculte des Lettres, University of Manouba, Tunis, where he remained until 2005. He was promoted to the rank of Full Professor of English and Linguistics in 2004. He has also been involved in other teaching, research, administrative activities:

he was Senior Fulbright Scholar at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA in 1996. He has reviewed articles and books for a number of local and overseas journals. Since the early 1990s he has been involved in the supervision of a number of MA and PhD theses, and has chaired Scientific Committees and programs including Recruiting and Promotion Committees, the Tunisian National Graduate Studies program, and MA in Applied Linguistics programs (both at Manouba and Bahrain universities).

He came to the Gulf (on secondment) in 2005, first to Oman (Nizwa College of Education and Sultan Qaboos University) then the University of Bahrain. His areas of interest and specialization include all aspects of the structure of English, formal and comparative syntax, the syntax-morphology interface, and second language acquisition. He is an author of many articles and books.