Jacquelyn E. Schachter (September 21, 1936 – October 22, 2011) was professor emerita of linguistics at the

University of Oregon The University of Oregon (UO, U of O or Oregon) is a Public university, public research university in Eugene, Oregon, United States. Founded in 1876, the university is organized into nine colleges and schools and offers 420 undergraduate and gra ...

. She received her Ph.D. in 1971 from

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school then known as the southern branch of the C ...

, with a dissertation entitled, "Presuppositional and Counterfactual Conditional Sentences."

Career

Schachter taught at the

University of Southern California The University of Southern California (USC, SC, or Southern Cal) is a Private university, private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in ...

from 1971 to 1991 before taking up a position at the University of Oregon in 1991. At Oregon she was the Director of the American English Institute and a Linguistics Department faculty until she retired in 1999.

Research

Schachter's primary research field was

second language acquisition Second-language acquisition (SLA), sometimes called second-language learning—otherwise referred to as L2 (language 2) acquisition, is the process of learning a language other than one's native language (L1). SLA research examines how learners ...

(SLA), investigating the role of Universal Grammar in conditioning patterns of SLA. Her work showed a lasting concern with methodological issues in second language research. (See e.g. Schachter 1998). She also had research interests in

cognitive neuroscience Cognitive neuroscience is the scientific field that is concerned with the study of the Biology, biological processes and aspects that underlie cognition, with a specific focus on the neural connections in the brain which are involved in mental ...

and

psycholinguistics Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind ...

. Schachter contributed to the fields of TESOL and SLA by coediting two important volumes of readings, Robinett and Schachter (1983) and Gass and Schachter (1989). In addition, she edited a book series for Lawrence Erlbaum Associates entitled ''Second Language Acquisition Research: Theoretical and Methodological Issues''. She was the editor of the conference proceedings for the international TESOL conferences of 1978–80 and the editor of the ''

TESOL Quarterly ''TESOL Quarterly'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of TESOL International Association. It covers English language teaching and learning, standard English as a second dialect, including articles ...

'' from June 1978 to 1982. One of her daughters, Jana DeMeire, was lost in the crash of Swissair Flight 111 in 1998.

Selected publications

* Gass, Susan M. and Jacquelyn Schachter, eds. 1989. ''Linguistic Perspectives on Second Language Acquisition''. Cambridge University Press. * Robinett, Betty Wallace and Jacquelyn Schachter, eds.. 1983. ''Second Language Learning: Contrastive Analysis, Error Analysis, and Related Aspects''. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. * Schachter, Jacquelyn. 1974. An error in error analysis. ''Language Learning'' 24, 205–214. * Schachter, Jacquelyn. 1988. Second Language Acquisition and Its Relationship to Universal Grammar. ''Applied Linguistics'' 9, 219–235. * Schachter, Jacquelyn. 1998. Recent research in Language Learning Studies: Promises and Problems. ''Language Learning'' 48, 557–583.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Schachter, Jacquelin 2011 deaths University of Oregon faculty University of California, Los Angeles alumni University of Southern California faculty Women linguists 1936 births Applied linguists Presidents of the American Association for Applied Linguistics