Alison Mackey

Alison Mackey is a Kenneth W. Mildenberger Prize-winning linguist who specializes in applied linguistics, second language acquisition and research methodology. She is currently a professor in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on applied linguistics and research methods.

Since 1998, Alison Mackey has been a professor at Georgetown University.She also does research in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University during summers since 2012.

Mackey is the Editor-in-Chief of the Cambridge University Press journal, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics.

Mackey is a co-founder of IRIS (the Instruments for Second Language Research digital repository).

She is also a series editor of the Routledge Second Language Acquisition Research series.

Mackey published two articles in The Guardian, one suggesting that different types and levels of motivation might be a key to second language learning, and a follow-up piece on What happens in the brain when you learn a language?.

Mackey's most cited book is "Second language research: methodology and design" (with Susan M. Gass) and her most cited journal article is Conversational Interaction and Second Language Development: Recasts, Responses, and Red Herrings? (with Jenefer Philp), published in The Modern Language Journal in 1998. One of her most important contributions to the research methodology area is her second most highly cited book "Stimulated recall methodology in second language research," which established this data collection approach as a key part of the second language research area.

Mackey has publications in the major applied linguistics research journals, including Studies in Second Language Acquisition, The Modern Language Journal, Language Teaching Research, Applied Linguistics, System, TESOL Quarterly, the AILA Review, Language Learning, and International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, amongst others. She has published books with Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Routledge, Taylor and Francis, John Benjamins, Wiley-Blackwell and Lawrence Erlbaum.

Mackey has also published one popular audience book, The Bilingual Edge: Why, when and how to teach a child second language (HarperCollins, with Kendall King). This book has been translated into multiple foreign languages.

• 2016: Kenneth W. Mildenberger Prize (with Susan Gass)