After 18 years at the University of Auckland, Distinguished Professor Rod Ellis is retiring.
Rod has had a long and varied career in second language acquisition — including literally writing the textbook.
The Study of Second Language Acquisition, which he published in 1994, currently has 16,602 citations on Google Scholar and counting, and was awarded the Duke of Edinburgh prize in 1995. This award took Rod to Buckingham Palace, and he smiles when he says that “it’s the only time I’ve been inside.”
Rod has been at the University of Auckland since 1998, and this is the longest position he has held in a wide and varied international career.
After completing his undergraduate study at the University of Nottingham he wanted to travel, and ended up teaching at a Berlitz language school in Spain. After returning from this he taught in an elementary school in Dalston, London.
In 1967, he moved to Zambia.
Zambia had gained its independence in 1964, and Rod spend just over three years there teaching English to the first generation of Zambian children to be given the opportunity for secondary schooling.
He taught in a small town around 250 miles from Lusaka, and fondly remembers travelling to work along a dirt road through a game park — and having to stop to let elephants cross the road.
After this he returned to the United Kingdom to do his masters in linguistics and language education at the University of Leeds, and after completing this was approached by the Ministry of External Development to teach at the only secondary teacher education college in Zambia, on invitation from the Zambian government.
So he returned again to Zambia, and spent five and a half years training English teachers in the small town of Kabwe.
Following this he did another masters in education at the University of Bristol, and moved into academia at St Mary’s College in Twickenham, London, teaching linguistics and TESOL.
From there he went to Ealing College of Higher Education — which became Thames Valley University. It was here that he published Understanding Second Language Acquisition, which was awarded the inaugural British Association of Applied Linguists’ prize for the best book in applied linguistics in 1985.
Understanding Second Language Acquisition has attracted over 5000 citations since its publication, and a second edition was published in 2015.
After this he moved to Temple University in Japan. Rod says that “Japan was a real experience”. He left Japan in 1993 to take up a professorship at Temple University in Philadelphia, which he more coyly describes as “an experience”, and admits that he “never really took to American culture”.
