Jeanne Varney Pleasants

Jeanne Varney Pleasants (24 June 1898 – 16 February 1986) was a French-born phonetician and educator. She spent several decades working at Columbia University and Barnard College, where she was a professor of French and started the institutions' first language labs. She was a 1947 Guggenheim Fellow and published the book Etudes sur l'E Muet in 1956. Biography Jeanne Vidon was born to Maria ( De Croux) and Ferdinand Vidon on 24 June 1898 in Évian-les-Bains, a small town in the department of Haute-Savoie. She studied at the University of Paris, where she obtained a teachers' degree in 1923 and a PhD in comparative linguistics in 1933. In 1933, she started working at Barnard College as a lecturer. She was later promoted to assistant professor in 1938 and associate professor in 1948. In 1958, she was promoted to full professor, In 1956, Barnard College's foreign language studio was inaugurated in her honor. In 1958, she became director of another new language lab at Columbia, with pronunciation practice running on staff-made audio tapes. Michael Riffaterre, who was a doctoral student and later professor at Columbia, once worked with her on poetry recordings. She also worked as a language lab development consultant in other educational institutions.

She also supported using literature for language education, particularly pronunciation, instead of the audio-lingual method, Among her education-oriented works include a French education textbook named Pronunciation in French.