Alison Mackey

Alison Mackey is an applied linguist and Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University, with a long-standing affiliate post at Lancaster University. Her work has carried the interactionist tradition forward by turning it into an empirical programme with a disciplined methodological toolkit.

Mackey's research has focused on feedback, uptake, and the role of interaction in L2 development, often in classroom and task contexts. She has done more than almost anyone to legitimize stimulated recall as a principled elicitation technique, and her methods textbook with Gass has become a standard reference for SLA data collection.

Career

• PhD from the University of Sydney
• Professor at Georgetown University
• Affiliate professor at Lancaster University, UK
• Past president of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL)

Published Work

• Conversational Interaction in Second Language Acquisition (ed., 2007)
• Data Elicitation for Second and Foreign Language Research (with Susan Gass, 2007)
• Second Language Research: Methodology and Design (with Susan Gass, 2005, 2016)
• Many influential articles on feedback, recasts, and interaction in classroom and lab settings

Influence

• Central figure in the empirical operationalization of the Interaction Hypothesis
• Shaped how contemporary SLA researchers think about and design feedback studies
• Her methodology textbooks with Gass have trained much of the current generation of SLA researchers