Sarah T. Barrows

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Sarah Tracy Barrows (October 21, 1870, Hudson, Ohio - 1952, Contra Costa, California [1] ) was an American phonetician. She was best known for her pioneering work on the phonetics of American English pronunciation and her many applied phonetics publications aimed at public school teachers (1926), speech therapists (1927), actors (1935, 1938) and immigrants learning English (Barrows 1918, 1922).

Contents

Education and career

Sarah T. Barrows received her B.L. from Iowa State College in 1891 [2] and her M.A. from Cornell in 1893. [3] She received a certificate of proficiency in phonetics from the University of Marburg in (1908). [4] She continued her studies in phonetics at the University of Hamburg (1914) and the University of Munich (1915). [5]

Barrows held a number of academic positions during the course of her career. She was Assistant Professor of German at the Ohio State University from 1907/1908 until 1919/1920. [6] She was the Director of Teaching English to Foreigners at the San Francisco State Teachers' College from 1920 to 1923. [5] As part of an immigrant education program there, she helped develop a handbook for teachers of immigrants for the California Department of Public Instruction, Division of Immigrant Education, called English Pronunciation for Foreigners (Barrows 1922). The booklet contains techniques for teaching English-language pronunciation to recent immigrants, specifically those with Italian, Spanish, Scandinavian, Slavic, Japanese, and Chinese language backgrounds. [7] In 1924 she was hired to teach phonetics and supervise a speech clinic by the newly formed Speech Department at Iowa State University, one of the first ones founded in the United States. [8] [9] Her being hired to this position is considered a landmark in the development of the scientific study and treatment of speech disorders. [10] In 1928 she moved to San Jose State College, where she taught until 1930. She appears to have regularly taught phonetics at summer sessions at the University of California-Berkeley from 1928 through, at least, 1943. [5] [4] By 1949 she was retired and living in Saratoga, California. [11]

Notable achievements

Sarah T. Barrows was one of the Foundation Members of the Linguistic Society of America. [12] [13] She was one of only 31 women out of a group of 264 Foundation Members, and she was one of only 3 of the women Foundation Members to hold a position at an AAU (Association of American Universities) member institution (University of Iowa). She remained a member of the Linguistic Society of America until 1927.

She was the first woman to have a publication in the Linguistic Society of America's organ, Language (Barrows 1926). Hers is the only book review by a woman in the journal's first 20 volumes. [13]

Selected works

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References

  1. ↑ "Barrows - California, Death Index, 1940-1997 - Ancestry.com". www.ancestry.com. Retrieved 2020-03-06.
  2. ↑ "Alumni and Ex-Students of Iowa State College 1872-1914". Iowa History Project. Retrieved 6 March 2020.
  3. ↑ Cornell university. Class of 1893. [from old catalog]; Northup, Clark Sutherland (1913). The third roster of the class of 1893 of Cornell university. The Library of Congress. Ithaca, N.Y. : Priv. print.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  4. 1 2 Register - University of California. University of California Press. 1943.
  5. 1 2 3 Register - University of California. University of California Press. 1927.
  6. ↑ "Our Department | Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures". germanic.osu.edu. Retrieved 2020-03-06.
  7. ↑ Eliassen, Meredith. "Into the Archives: San Francisco State University Archives" (PDF). UC Press.
  8. ↑ "Quarterly Journal of Speech Education: News and notes". 2009-06-05. doi:10.1080/00335632309379458.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  9. ↑ "Judy Duchan's History of Speech - Language Pathology". www.acsu.buffalo.edu. Retrieved 2020-03-06.
  10. ↑ Williams, Mary E. (2012). Speech disorders (1st ed.). Detroit: Greenhaven Press. p. 143. ISBN   978-0-7377-6604-2. OCLC   824947687.
  11. ↑ "Speech correction in the west". Western Speech. 13 (4): 14. 2009-06-06. doi:10.1080/10570314909373381.
  12. ↑ "Front Matter". Language. 2 (1): 78–95. 1926. ISSN   0097-8507. JSTOR   408781.
  13. 1 2 Falk, Julia S. (1994). "The Women Foundation Members of the Linguistic Society of America". Language. 70 (3): 455–490. doi:10.1353/lan.1994.0031. ISSN   1535-0665. S2CID   143631957.
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