ABSTRACT
According to Susan M. Gass, her interest in language learning was sparked (or perhaps provoked) most intensely when, without any formal background in language pedagogy, she found herself teaching Italian to a lively assortment of thirty very different 6-year-olds, ranging from true beginners to bilinguals. Sue, as she is widely known, had already been quite interested in language for many years-as a high school student living in Italy, as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, and as a graduate student at Middlebury College in Vermont, where she completed an MA in Italian. But when she returned to Italy to work as a teacher, she realized (despite, or perhaps because of, the rather tricky nature of her teaching context) that language learning was something she needed to understand better. Hence, it was back to California, where she enrolled in the linguistics program at UCLA. There she completed her MA and began coursework toward a Ph.D. Moving to the Midwest in 1975, she continued her studies at Indiana University, and, although no courses in second language learning existed then, her interest in applied linguistics was sparked through a course on language testing. And so it began. Her dissertation on transfer and cross-linguistic universals in second language acquisition was among the first to consider learners’ interlanguages as natural languages in their own right and SLA processes as consistent across languages, that is, not simply the result of transferring particular habits. Her research, the results of which were published in Language Learning in 1979, not only went beyond the current thinking at the time, but also represented one of the first endeavors in this area that genuinely applied linguistic theory. A natural next step for Sue, as has been the case throughout her career, was to explore applications of the theory to questions of effective pedagogy; she conducted an important classroom study (1982) which demonstrated learners’ ability to generalize instruction from one type of relative clause to another, in effect taking advantage of implicational relationships to go beyond what was explicitly taught. Undeniably, her early work in applied linguistics was groundbreaking for the field.
