ABSTRACT
Second language acquisition (SLA) has been an independent research discipline since the late 1970s, and Sue Gass has been a leading figure throughout its evolution. The first issue of Studies in Second Language Acquisition (SSLA) was published in 1978. Sue’s PhD thesis “An investigation of syntactic transfer in adult second language acquisition” was completed in 1979 and published as an article in Language Learning in the same year. Second language acquisition: An introductory course (Gass & Selinker, 1994) is for many the standard introductory text. Sue has been associate editor of SSLA for longer than I can remember, an active member of the American Association for Applied Linguistics since its inception in 1977 (president in 1987), and is currently the president of the International Association for Applied Linguistics (AILA). Sue’s influence can be seen throughout the field. Yet, for me, her most profound contribution is her program of research into the interaction approach. It was Pit Corder (1967), a founding father of applied linguistics, who famously identified the divorce of input from intake in adult language learning. It was Mike Long in his PhD thesis Input, interaction, and second language acquisition (1980) who proposed that they may be brought back together through interaction. Sue’s work over the last 20 years has persuasively realized the details of this reconciliation (Gass, 1997, 2002, 2003; Gass & Mackey, 2007; Gass, Mackey, & Pica, 1998; Gass & Varonis, 1994; Mackey, 1999; Mackey & Gass, 2006).
