Yuko Goto Butler is Professor of Educational Linguistics at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also the director of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) program at Penn. Her research interests are primarily focused on the improvement of second/foreign language education among young learners in the U.S. and Asia in response to the diverse needs of an increasingly globalizing world.

Her work has also focused on identifying effective ESL/EFL teaching and learning strategies and assessment methods that take into account the relevant linguistic and cultural contexts in which instruction takes place.