Teresa Pica

Teresa Pica (1945–2011) was Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education from 1983 until her death, and one of the researchers who turned the Interaction Hypothesis from a Long-and-Varonis slogan into a mature empirical programme. She came to SLA sideways: first a speech-language pathologist running a pre-school language stimulation programme at the Child Development Center in Mount Vernon, New York, then into applied linguistics.

Her extension of interaction research centred on negotiation of meaning as a function of task type and participant relationship. Symmetric, information-gap, outcome-required tasks generate more negotiation, she argued, and negotiation is where comprehensible input, modified output, and noticing all converge. Her 1994 Language Learning review "Research on Negotiation" is the standard reference, and much of today's TBLT research literature sits on her classifications of task type. She supervised more than fifty doctoral dissertations at Penn, including Jessica Williams and Catherine Doughty.

Career

• Speech-language pathologist before entering SLA
• Professor of Education, University of Pennsylvania GSE, 1983–2011
• Died 15 November 2011 of viral encephalitis

Published Work

• "Research on Negotiation: What Does It Reveal About Second-Language Learning Conditions, Processes, and Outcomes?", Language Learning (1994)
• Task-type and interaction studies through the 1980s and 1990s that defined how the field operationalised "negotiation"
• "Second language teaching and research relationships: a North American view," Language Teaching Research (1997)

Influence

• Gave the Interaction Hypothesis a third leg by foregrounding the social and participant-role conditions that make negotiation happen
• Shaped the empirical shape of TBLT through her taxonomy of task types
• Trained a cohort of interaction researchers who now run the programme at their own institutions