Evelyn Hatch

Evelyn Hatch is Professor Emerita in the UCLA Department of TESL/Applied Linguistics, where she did most of her career. She trained across fields — BA political science, MA linguistics, PhD education — and that breadth shows in the way her work reframed SLA in the 1970s.

Before Hatch, second-language research was largely an inventory of learner errors at the sentence level. Her 1978 paper "Discourse analysis, speech acts, and second language acquisition" and the 1978 edited volume Second Language Acquisition turned the field's attention to interaction: learners do not acquire syntax and then deploy it in conversation, they build syntax out of conversation. That move is the hinge on which the Interaction Hypothesis swings a decade later, and its fingerprints are on every subsequent framework that takes classroom talk seriously.

Career

• BA, MA, PhD at UCLA
• Long career in the UCLA TESL/Applied Linguistics programme; now Professor Emerita
• Trained many of the researchers who went on to define interaction-based SLA

Published Work

• Second Language Acquisition: A Book of Readings (ed., 1978)
• "Discourse analysis and second language acquisition" (1978)
• "Conversational analysis: An alternative methodology for second language acquisition research" (1980)
• Discourse and Language Education (1992, Cambridge)

Influence

• Reframed SLA around discourse and interaction, not just interlanguage morphology
• Set up the intellectual conditions for Long's Interaction Hypothesis and for the Hawai'i school of SLA
• Remains a reference point whenever the field relitigates the relationship between conversation and grammar