Obituary: Sally Westerman Jacoby, 1949-2007 - eScholarship

Sally Westerman Jacoby, 1949-2007 Sally Jacoby, one of the founding editors of Issues in Applied Linguistics and a graduate of the doctoral program in Applied Linguistics at UCLA, has died of the complications of lung cancer in Dover, New Hampshire. (She had never smoked.) Sally brought an extraordinarily strong academic and professional background to her work in applied linguistics. She completed four degrees: a science degree in theatre from North Western, an arts degree in linguistics from Tel Aviv (born in from Birmingham, and then her Ph.D. She had extensive experience in theatre (as an actress and in production) and in language teaching, was educated in both the British and American traditions of applied linguistics, and had a deep understanding of foreign language teaching and learning (she also worked as a Hebrew-English translator in Israel). She combined a deep intellectuality with an understanding of the practical contexts to which applied linguistics was relevant. She also had the critical temperament of a true scholar. were challenging many of the orthodoxies of mainstream applied linguistics in a department and program that had already established itself as one of the very best in the world. The high standards that were the hallmark of her editorship of Issues in Applied Linguistics were entirely characteristic of her: Sally was the ideal student, curious, questioning, formidably intelligent, hard working, meticulous, independent, lively, intense. Her Ph.D. dissertation was a study of a team of physicists at UCLA, rehearsing conference presentations. She was attracted to the idea of rehearsal of Manny Schegloff. She demonstrated conclusively the crucial role this kind of fundamental research plays in understanding applied questions of teaching and ESP and EAP is far-reaching, and constructive, and her work is having a lasting impact on those studying how to improve the communication skills of international students in academic contexts all over the world. at the American Association for Applied Linguistics meeting in Portland, OR, she took part in an invited colloquium on Co-Construction, for which I was a discussant. An inveterate perfectionist, her own worst enemy in this regard, she had struggled to get the paper ready on time, and in fact had written out what she wanted to say