[2][3] Born in 1953, [citation needed] Mary Macken-Horarik is the eldest of ten children and she was educated at Catholic schools in Sydney, Australia.
Becoming increasingly interested in linguistics, in 1984, she took up a post as a teacher-linguist in a bilingual school in the remote Aboriginal town of Wadeye in the Northern Territory.
Her efforts to make linguistic breakthroughs appliable and accessible to language educators were recognised by the Australian Research Council in 2011 when the project 'Grammar and Praxis: Investigating a Grammatics for 21st Century English' was awarded an ARC grant worth AU$449,951 (Chief investigators: Mary Macken-Horarik, Len Unsworth, and Kristina Love).
[8] According to the ARC, this project "will yield vital information about how grammar contributes to development of coherent, cumulative and portable KAL [knowledge about language] at key stages of schooling.
"[12] The majority of Macken-Horarik's research publications explore the relationship between knowledge about language (KAL) and literacy, focusing on the needs of students for whom subject English is an enigma, a problem and a barrier to success in schooling.