Sadly Michael H. Long passed away in his sleep last Sunday surrounded by his loved ones. He was one of the most respected scholars in second language acquisition, elevating it to a serious field of research with his enormous impetus and larger-than-life force. He was a great source of inspiration to many of us, generously helping and encouraging us to initiate our academic careers.   

Michael H. Long obtained his degrees from the University of Birmingham (Bachelor of Laws), University of London (Post Graduate Certificate in EFL), University of Essex (MA in Applied Linguistics) and University of California (PhD). His first position was at the University of Pennsylvania but he carried out his core academic work first as professor of SLA at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and as the Director of the School of Languages Literatures and Cultures at the University of Maryland.  

We share the words by one of the people who nominated him for the Distinguished Achievement Award that he received at the International Association of Task-based Language Teaching Conference in Barcelona in 2017: 

“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.” 

He will forever be missed.