Jacquelyn E. Schachter (September 21, 1936 – October 22, 2011) was professor emerita of linguistics at the
University of Oregon. She received her Ph.D. in 1971 from
UCLA, with a dissertation entitled, "Presuppositional and Counterfactual Conditional Sentences."
Career
Schachter taught at the
University of Southern California 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 by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the scientific dis ...
(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 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'' 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