Elizabeth G. Joiner

Elizabeth G. Joiner died peacefully on April 5, 2025 from metastatic breast cancer. She was born in Atlanta on February 15, 1939, to Albert Ross Garner and Bessie Mae Sessions. She spent much of her youth with aunts, uncles, and grandparents in east Tennessee, her mother having died in 1941. She graduated from LaGrange College (Georgia) in 1959 and began teaching high school English and French. After earning her M.A. from the University of Georgia in 1964, she and her husband Don Joiner taught for several years at Winthrop University. In 1974 she received a PhD from Ohio State and began her career at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, where she taught until her retirement in 2001. In addition to French language courses, she taught French film, trained student teachers, and directed the language laboratory for several years. She was named the Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts in 1999.

Her publications played a major role in significant changes that were occurring in language teaching at the time, in particular a focus on communication as the goal and as the means in second language classroom teaching. Her work consistently merged the classroom, the cultures of the language, and the process of language acquisition, often using unedited written and spoken texts in the foreign language to introduce “real world language learning”. The French government recognized her achievements with the award Officier de l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques in 1992.

In 1996, several years after Don Joiner’s untimely death, she married Buford Norman, who shared her love of all things French, especially literature, art, theatre, music, and fine cuisine. They spent more and more time in Paris later in their careers, which allowed her to work with language specialists from several countries, in particular with Alfred Tomatis. She also became an accomplished painter.

She is survived by her husband, an aunt Hazel Garner, and several Garner and Sessions cousins, all of whom were very close to her. She is also deeply missed by Buford’s family and by numerous friends on two continents.

In lieu of flowers, please consider contributions to the National Trust for Historic Preservation or to Macular Degeneration Research (BrightFocus.org).