Michael Long
Michael H. Long (1945-2021) was an American applied linguist whose career gave him unusual authority in both research-heavy SLA and the messier world of pedagogy. He taught at the University of Hawai'i and later at the University of Maryland, where he helped build one of the strongest SLA communities in the field and mentored a generation of researchers.
Long had the reputation of a hard thinker, a sharp critic, and a serious builder. He did not simply publish arguments; he built programs, shaped doctoral training, and kept pressing the field to be more rigorous than it was always comfortable being. His name is most closely tied to the Interaction Hypothesis, Focus on Form, and strong-version TBLT, and those ideas came attached to a very definite scholarly temperament: exacting, combative when needed, and deeply committed to getting the theory-pedagogy connection right.
Career
- Taught and led programs at the University of Hawai'i and the University of Maryland
- Founded and shaped major SLA research environments, especially at Maryland
- Supervised and influenced a large network of doctoral students and younger scholars
- Maintained a public reputation for methodological seriousness and unusually high standards
Published Work
- Input, Interaction, and Second-Language Acquisition (edited volume, 1996)
- Problems in SLA (2007)
- Second Language Acquisition and Task-Based Language Teaching (2015)
- Foundational papers on interaction, focus on form, and methodological principles in TBLT