Susan Gass
Gass
Susan M. Gass is an American applied linguist and University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University, where she has been based for decades in the Second Language Studies program. Her career has centred on input, interaction, and the methodology of SLA research itself.
Gass's contribution has been to take the interactionist tradition seriously enough to systematize it. Where Long proposed the mechanism, Gass helped specify it, test it, and make it teachable to graduate students. Her introductory textbook with Selinker has trained more than one generation of SLA researchers.
Career
- PhD in Linguistics from Indiana University
- University Distinguished Professor, Michigan State University
- Director of the English Language Center and the Second Language Studies program at MSU
- Past president of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL)
Published Work
- Second Language Acquisition: An Introductory Course (with Larry Selinker, 1994; later editions with Jennifer Behney and Luke Plonsky)
- Input, Interaction, and the Second Language Learner (1997)
- Data Elicitation for Second and Foreign Language Research (with Alison Mackey, 2007)
- Extensive journal work on interaction, feedback, and research methodology
Influence
- With Michael Long and Alison Mackey, made interaction research a mature, cumulative programme
- Shaped how SLA methodology (elicited imitation, stimulated recall, uptake coding) is taught and practiced
- Co-author of the textbook most commonly used to induct new SLA researchers into the field