Rita MacDonald is an Academic English Language Researcher at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. She has worked extensively in the field of content-language integration, both as a K-12 ESL teacher and as a teacher educator in MATESOL at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont. As coordinator of two National Professional Development grants, she has worked to build awareness of discipline-specific language and instructional capacity for content-embedded language instruction for K-12 in-service teachers and has facilitated the integration of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory and pedagogy into pre-service teacher education, resulting in a curriculum being used as a model by other universities, and has published in the fields of teacher collaboration and integrated content-language instruction.

Since joining the Wisconsin Center for Education Research in April of 2012 as a mixed-methods researcher, she has worked on the application of SFL pedagogy to the academic language of mathematics and on the development of a Language Complexity Tool to rate the linguistic demand of assessment stimuli and items. She is coordinator of the Forum for Research in Academic Spanish and English (FRASE) at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research.

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