In memory of
Mike Long
He Will Forever Be Missed
Mike received an LL.B. (Bachelor of Laws) degree from the University of Birmingham and a Post Graduate Certificate from the Department of English as a Foreign Language in Education from the Institute of Education, University of London. He then received a M.A. in Applied Linguistics from the University of Essex and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, also in Applied Linguistics. His first academic position was at the University of Pennsylvania. He remained there for three years before leaving for the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he worked for 21 years. In 2003, he accepted a position as Professor of SLA and the Director of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Maryland, College Park where he mentored doctoral students for another 18 years. He had a profound influence on the field of Second Language Acquisition, and he will be forever remembered and missed by the countless students, colleagues, and researchers who were lucky enough to cross his path.
by Martin East (IATBLT President)
Mike was a great ally and advocate of the TBLT endeavour, publishing widely and contributing substantially to the scholarly community. Along with Peter Skehan, Mike was the inaugural recipient of the IATBLT’s Distinguished Achievement Award (made in 2017 in the Barcelona conference).
One of the nominators for Mike’s award had this to say about him in the nomination statement:
“It is almost impossible to initiate a research career within TBLT without running into any of the concepts and constructs that can either be directly attributed to Michael H. Long or that he has vehemently promoted throughout his career. Michael H. Long was one of the first researchers, if not the first one, to bring both research and pedagogical attention to tasks in the context of second language acquisition. His definition of task is quite probably one of the most cited ones in the field and his seminal work on interaction gave rise to the Interaction Hypothesis which has generated hundreds of studies in the last three decades. Among several others, concepts such as needs analysis or focus-on-form have become an integral part of our TBLT landscape.”