Sue Barry

Associate Professor

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Academic Area

Foreign Language Education

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Short Bio

Sue Barry is an associate professor and program coordinator for the Foreign Language Education Program in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching.  She has been an Auburn faculty member since 1993. Prior to receiving her doctorate from Purdue University, she taught Spanish at McCluer North High School, Florissant, Missouri, for many years.

Dr. Barry’s teaching interests include the development of task-based learning environments for second language acquisition that are rich in target language input. Her work in instructional design focuses on integrating second language acquisition, literacy, and cultural diversity, which also frames her research agenda: cross-linguistic comparisons of surface code effects on recall and inference generation for native speakers of English and native speakers of Spanish.

Dr. Barry received a grant from the Fulbright-Hays Group Study Abroad Program to direct a five-week study abroad program in Peru for 13 teachers of Spanish during the summer of 2001. Teachers attended Catholic University in Lima, lived with families, and collected authentic reading materials for thematic units for their own classrooms.

She directs a Teacher Exchange with Universidad Nacional in Heredia, Costa Rica. This two-week exchange is open to teachers preparing for graduate degrees in English as a Second Language and/or Spanish as a Second Language at Universidad Nacional (UNA) in Heredia, Costa Rica and Auburn University. The exchanges take place in January for UNA students and July for Auburn students.

She developed a distance-learning program in foreign language education for Spanish and French teachers that offers a M.Ed., an Alternative M.Ed., and Ed.S. degrees. She utilizes a synchronous interactive Zoom classroom and two weekend seminars per semester to create a community of learners composed of on-campus students and classroom teachers from a five-state area in the Southeast. This cross-curricular design combines synchronous on-line courses in pedagogy with courses in Spanish or French as well as study abroad opportunities to help pre-service teachers and classroom teachers improve their instructional strategies and their foreign language proficiency.

Dr. Barry has published articles in the Modern Language Journal and Language Learning.

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Education

Ph.D. in Foreign Language Education, 1992, Purdue University

M.A. in Latin American History, Northeast Missouri State University

B.S. in French, Mathematics, Spanish, Southeast Missouri State

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Professional Experience

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