Two Women Scholars to Share a Modern Language Association Prize

Susan Gass, University Distinguished Professor and director of the English Language Center at Michigan State University, and Alison Mackey, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, have been selected to share the Kenneth W. Mildenberger Prize from the Modern Language Association for their work in teaching English as a second language. Professors Gass and Mackey are co-editors of The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition.

Dr. Gass is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, where she majored in Italian. She holds master’s degrees from Middlebury College and the University of California at Los Angeles and a Ph.D. from Indiana University in Bloomington. From 2002 to 2008 she served as president of the International Association of Applied Linguistics.

Dr. Mackey is a graduate of Lancaster University in the United Kingdom. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Sydney in Australia. She has been on the faculty at Georgetown University since 1998.

The professors will receive their awards in January at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in Chicago.