Herb Saucier was flabbergasted. Invited to attend a senior’s thesis-binding ceremony on the porch of Coram Library, he suddenly found himself at the center of attention.

“I was just standing there listening, and then she called me over. And oh my God! I had no idea.”

The senior was Martha Coleman ’23, a major in French and francophone studies from Seattle, whose thesis . A key part of the thesis-binding ritual is having a �ֲ���ý friend help out, and in this case, the friend was a very surprised Saucier.

And as Saucier and Coleman maneuvered the 142 printed thesis pages into the traditional black binder, cheers went up from friends, faculty and staff gathered around. 

Most times, the cheers are solely for the senior. This time, the cheers were both for Coleman and for Saucier, a well-known driver of the Bobcat Express, a small fleet of vehicles that shuttle �ֲ���ý students to their community activities in Lewiston.

Coleman chose Saucier for the special occasion to show appreciation for his friendship and support during her senior year.

Over the past year, several times each week, at 7:15 in the morning, Coleman hopped into one of the shuttle vehicles, usually a Nissan Leaf, with Saucier at the wheel, for the 10-minute drive to Lewiston High School, where she taught French as part of her �ֲ���ý education minor.

Maybe they only chatted for 10 minutes a day, about this or that, but the goodwill and friendship quickly added up. “Little interactions like that mean so much,” says Coleman.

Saucier is a 73-year-old retired Lewiston policeman whose father spoke only French, so he grew up learning and speaking French at home. During the commute to the high school, three days a week, “we would talk French,” says Saucier. ““She told me that she was doing her thesis on the French down here in Lewiston and what have you. She would ask me questions on my upbringing. That was really neat.”

Maybe they only chatted for 10 minutes a day, about this or that, but the goodwill and friendship quickly added up. “Little interactions like that mean so much,” says Coleman. 

When it comes to the college’s shuttle, �ֲ���ý students often talk about the lifts they get from the shuttle drivers, not just the transportation kind but the emotional kind, too, through caring words and support. “I just love any chance I can get to talk about how awesome the shuttle drivers are,” says Coleman, speaking for many students.

Growing up in Seattle, Coleman remembers photos of her father’s bike trip through France when he was a high school senior, and hearing him talk about exploring the country thanks to French skills he learned in school.

“I came to see studying French as a way of exploring the world,” says Coleman. But between COVID and other interruptions, Coleman decided to stay on campus for her junior year rather than travel abroad. “I could not fathom uprooting myself one more time.” In the end, she did explore the world, in a sense, without ever leaving Lewiston.

Coleman’s year-long honors thesis was advised by Professor of French and Francophone Studies Mary Rice-DeFosse, whose own scholarly publications include The Franco-Americans of Lewiston-Auburn, co-authored with James Myall.

The thesis has a section written in French that traces the history of French in Maine, and an English section focusing on community perceptions of the role and importance of French in Maine, drawn from recent reports on Maine’s Franco American communities, her own survey results, and interviews with several community members.

Maine’s Franco American communities, which thrived into the mid-1900s, were created through years of cultural exchange with the Canadian maritime provinces and with Quebec. And during Coleman’s morning commutes to the high school, she sat beside a man who personifies part of the history of French in Maine, where a quarter of residents self-identify as Franco American or French Canadian. In Lewiston, the percentage is near 60 percent.

Herb Saucier’s French-speaking father grew up during the Depression in the far northern Maine town of Madawaska, located on the St. John River, which is the U.S.–Canada border.

“When my father was born, there was no hospital in Madawaska,” Saucier explains. “Women would cross the bridge into Edmundton, New Brunswick, and have their babies there, and then they’d come back to the U.S. So my father was born in Canada, but raised in northern Maine.”

In his early teens, Herb’s father worked in the woods as a lumberjack, later moving to Lewiston and starting a family. His father worked as a truck driver for one of the mills. “I was born just down the street from �ֲ���ý, at St. Mary’s,” he says. Growing up, “pretty much all we spoke at home was French. Even up till the time my father passed away in 2009, if I would go to his house or something to visit or whatever, help him with something, we always spoke French.”

While there are exceptions, Saucier’s generation of Franco Americans in Maine is considered the last to have learned French from their parents but not have been able to pass down the language to their children. “And I feel bad about that,” Saucier says. “I do wish my kids would’ve learned French. It’s something that has gotten lost. When there’s a break in the chain it’s kind of hard to keep it going.”

But the chain was, in many ways, forcibly broken by society’s bolt cutters. Through most of the 1900s, speaking French was not supported in local public schools. A 1919 state law, not repealed until 1969, banned the use of French in schools in all but foreign language classes. Even at �ֲ���ý into the early 1990s, a rule prohibited �ֲ���ý staff from speaking their native French in the presence of non-French speakers.

“Herb’s generation was doing the best they could to give their kids the tools they needed to survive a school system that, at the time, was really trying to discourage French,” Coleman says. “Or they’d been through that system themselves and seen how hard it was to go into a high school environment where speaking French wasn’t encouraged.”

Saucier and Coleman sometimes talked about his regret. “Herb was one of the first people to say to me, so candidly, that as much as he would love to see Lewiston go back to the way it was, in terms of its relationship with French, he didn’t see that ever coming to pass.” 

Saucier put a face to a feeling that Coleman saw echoed as she got deeper into her thesis research, including surveys and interviews with elderly Franco Americans in Lewiston.

It was eye-opening. She’d been hearing various upbeat Maine voices, reading Maine texts, and taking in media that, quite appropriately, shared excitement about the future of French in Maine, especially with new French speakers immigrating to Maine over the last 25 years from African countries such as Togo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, Djibouti, Rwanda, and Angola. 

Yet, she says, the feeling of loss tinged with acceptance that Saucier and others voiced is real. The feeling needs to be heard as a reminder that “grief and guilt can be hard to see,” she says. “Grief still needs to be a part of the conversation about French in Maine, and we have to have realistic hopes. How do we hope for something new instead of hoping for a return to something old?” 

The answer might come from what Coleman saw and learned about French culture in Lewiston through her classroom teaching experience at Lewiston High School. 

She met and worked with students “who have never heard the term ‘Franco American’ and know little to nothing about Maine’s French history” but still showed interest, she wrote in her thesis. 

And she engaged with students with French last names “who can’t speak or read the language themselves but still call their grandparents ��é��è���� and ��é��è����, Franco American terms of endearment; with students who attended French elementary schools in the DRC before coming to the U.S.; and with students who speak French fluently with their families but still take French courses to help improve their writing skills.”

Coleman doesn’t try to make a definitive statement about the direction of French in Maine in her thesis, but instead hopes to “open a conversation about how the role and importance of French in Maine is evolving as the range of French speakers in the state expands and diversifies.”

She ends her thesis with a conclusion written in both French and English that offers a series of future-focused questions about how French language and culture in Maine can be supported. 

Both conclusions end with two French sentences: Je ne sais pas. Mais j’ai hâte de voir ce qui se passera.

Translated by Coleman, it means, “I don’t know. But I can’t wait to see what will happen.”

Learning a new language opens up career prospects, richer travel experiences, and opportunities to communicate with people.

It also helps you see your own culture from a different perspective.

“You won’t know your own culture or language until you learn another language or culture,” says Keiko Konoeda, a lecturer in Japanese whose research focuses on teaching languages.

�ֲ���ý offers countless resources to learn a language, through courses, clubs, language tables, tutoring, and study-abroad opportunities.

“You can be immersed in the language,” Konoeda says. “There is a strong community for that.”

Lecturer in Japanese Keiko Konoeda teaches an introductory Japanese course. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

We asked foreign language faculty and student tutors about their best strategies for learning a new language, whether it’s French, Japanese, or ancient Greek. Here’s what they said.

1. Immerse yourself in any way you can.

Immersion is speaking, listening, and thinking in a new language as much as possible — but that doesn’t mean you have to go to a country where the language is spoken, says Michael Lombardi ’21, who tutors Japanese in the Academic Resource Commons.

Plenty of resources are available right on campus, such as “going to language table sessions, seeing your ARC Peer Tutor, and immersing yourself in the vibrant �ֲ���ý community,” he says.

Laurie O’Higgins,��Euterpe B. Dukakis Professor of Classical and Medieval Studies, presides over an induction ceremony for the classics honor society in 2017. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

2. Dedicate time each day.

Ancient Latin and Greek are somewhat different from modern languages, says Laurie O’Higgins, Euterpe B. Dukakis Professor of Classical and Medieval Studies — the learning focus is often on reading, rather than speaking and listening.

O’Higgins recommends setting aside quality time with the language. “Give 20 to 30 minutes, six days a week, to learning new forms and vocabulary. Those must be the best 20 to 30 minutes you can spare, when your brain is at its best. Have the environment as quiet as is possible. Focus exclusively on saying the words, reading them, and writing them too, if it’s Greek. Then stop.”

3. Do everything.

Communicating involves speaking, listening, reading, writing, and nonverbal expression. So does learning a new language.

“The best students practice writing by hand, read grammar explanations, listen to audio, practice speaking on their own, practice speaking with others, watch movies in the target language, and even practice acting out verbs or adjectives with their faces and bodies,” says Justine Wiesinger, assistant professor of Japanese.

Language-learning resources are particularly abundant in libraries, says Associate Professor of German Raluca Cernahoschi. “All the major newspapers have an online presence, and Ladd Library has a good selection of print newspapers and magazines in several languages. There are international editions of all major fashion magazines and many more online resources.

“Have a favorite novel? It’s probably been translated into your new language, too. The resources are endless and often only a click away.”

4. Listen to music.

“People are wired to remember rhythms and rhymes — song lyrics in a new language can help build vocabulary and grammar. My advice is to find a band you love to listen to in your target language,” Michael Lombardi says. “You’d be surprised by how much variety there is out there!”

5. Put vocabulary in context.

Dennis Browne is an associate professor of Russian who’s been learning German for several years. Browne likes to rehearse personal stories — for example, learning car-related vocabulary in order to talk about a time his car broke down — and tell the stories to native speakers of German.

Associate Professor of Russian Dennis Browne serves sausage during ”the Wurst day of the semester,” an open house for the Department of German and Russian Studies. An associate professor of Russian, Browne has studied German for years. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“You tell that story and find they don’t use those words in everyday German,” Browne says. “That’s useful because you realize that there are these technical terms, and then the terms people actually use.”

6. Tell stories.

Especially when a new language has a different writing system from English, it helps to associate feelings, images, and narratives with concepts you’re learning, says Wiesinger.

In kanji, one of the Japanese writing systems, characters represent things or ideas as opposed to sounds. Research has shown that narratives help with memorization — for example, Wiesinger encourages her students to think of the Japanese character for charcoal, 炭, as made up of symbols that look like a mountain, a cliff, and a fire.

“If you can imagine the shape of the mountains as you climb and the coolness you feel on your skin as you walk out onto a cliff, and then the smell of the charcoal fire you kindle, it will help retain the elements of this character in your mind and help distinguish it from similar characters, such as 岩,” which means rock, Wiesinger says.

Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies Baltasar Fra-Molinero teaches an intermediate Spanish course in Roger Williams Hall. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

7. Talk to a lot of people

Language learning happens in community, says Professor of Spanish Baltasar Fra-Molinero. “You learn a language not speaking to another person but by speaking to two, three, four, five other people. That’s how the process of language acquisition happens.”

8. Use flash cards.

“I recommend note cards or notebooks and keeping them neat and up to date,” says O’Higgins. “It’s not high-tech, but it works.”

Katherine Ziegler ’19 of Katonah, N.Y., who tutors Latin in the ARC and minors in German, heightens the tech just a little. “I really like to use sites like Quizlet to learn new vocabulary,” she says. “Quizlet is a website that allows you to make your own flashcards and then quiz and test yourself in a variety of ways. This is particularly helpful for Latin, which involves a lot of memorization.”

9. Keep a language notebook.

“I like to have a little notebook to write down new vocabulary, grammar paradigms, writing exercises or diary entries in the target language,” Ziegler says. “It’s also a nice place to write down any poems or phrases that you like. This helps remind me why I’m learning the new language in the first place.”

10. Plagiarize.

Well, not really, says Kirk Read, professor of French and francophone studies. But he recommends copying native speakers’ words and forms as much as possible. “Imitating good syntax, playing with it, feeling it and how it guides your thoughts, is the way to go. It will get you away from word-by-word translation, which is silly, wrong, and ineffective, though often hilarious.”

11. Make mistakes.

“Stop thinking,” says Read. “Language learning the first time you do it is all about hearing, mimicking, reproducing. No child ever turned to their parent and said, ‘How do I conjugate that verb?’”

Mary Rice-DeFosse, also a professor of French and francophone studies, asks students to “give up total mastery” once they’re at the intermediate level.

“It’s important that students not look up every word and instead begin to get the gist of a reading based on what they think they understand,” she says. “My job is to provide a safety net as they develop that skill. Eventually, they start to think — and even dream — in French.”

Associate Professor of German Jakub Kazecki makes a point in his introductory German language and culture course in 2017. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

12. Find what works for you.

“Put sticky notes with new vocabulary on furniture and your belongings in your room, listen to a lot of news and podcasts in the language, pick up a few lines from songs and sing them out loud, enjoy any silly language joke you can find,” says Associate Professor of German Jakub Kazecki.

“Because, you know, the German sausage is the Wurst.”

13. Be fearless.��

”Learning a new language can be greatly intimidating or even feel embarrassing when you mispronounce or misuse a word, but the more you practice it out loud — whether that’s in class, with your roommate, or with a peer tutor — the easier and the more comfortable it begins to feel,” says Claudia Glickman ’19 of Houston, a student tutor of German.

Staff of Lewiston’s French-language newspaper Le Messager, circa 1910. From “The Franco-Americans of Lewiston-Auburn,” courtesy of the University of Southern Maine, Franco-American Collection.

Even though �ֲ���ý professor Mary Rice-DeFosse and James Myall have studied Lewiston-Auburn’s Franco-American community for years, it can still surprise them.

While researching their new book, The Franco-Americans of Lewiston-Auburn (The History Press), the first comprehensive history of this community written for a general audience, they encountered a few shocks.

“There were lots of little details that were hidden even to people who had looked at that history for quite a long time,” says Myall, former coordinator of the University of Southern Maine’s Franco-American Collection and now executive director of the Freeport Historical Society.

One of the biggest bombshells (“I have trouble just picking one,” he says) came from early 20th-century local newspaper accounts of Franco-American children playing in the city dump in Little Canada (Lewiston’s Franco-American neighborhood) — a structural reminder of the discrimination and oppression new immigrant groups often face.

The authors were not the only ones to be surprised by the stories the book uncovered. “Although Franco-Americans are proud of their history, they don’t know how much they have to be proud of,” says Rice-DeFosse, a professor of French and Francophone studies.

• On April 27, 2015, Rice-DeFosse will be one of three faculty from Maine colleges and universities to receive the Maine Campus Compact’s Donald Harward Faculty Award for Service-Learning Excellence. “Her community-engaged work hits the faculty trifecta,” says �ֲ���ý Harward Center director Darby Ray, “as it involves substantial service to the off-campus community, innovative pedagogy and published scholarship.” In 2014, Rice-DeFosse was inducted into the Maine Franco-American Hall of Fame.

Myall and Rice-DeFosse saw a need for the book within the Franco-American community, to share with its members the details of their rich history, but they also wrote the book for a wider audience, to cast doubt on popularly held beliefs about immigrant identity and assimilation in America.

Sylvia and Rosaire Roy at WCOU Studios on Lisbon Street, Lewiston, circa 1945. From “The Franco-Americans of Lewiston-Auburn,” courtesy of the University of Southern Maine, Franco-American Collection.

“We have a notion of the American melting pot: immigrants come, the first generation doesn’t speak any English, the second generation learns English and the third generation is assimilated,” Rice-DeFosse says. “And Maine’s Franco-Americans do not follow that pattern.”

Instead, Rice-Defosse and Myall reveal in their book an extraordinarily resilient community of Americans who have managed to preserve their French and French-Canadian roots since they started to arrive in the Twin Cities in the mid-19th century to work in the Androscoggin River mills.

The chapters, organized chronologically, are divided into short sections that cover material spanning arts (early 20th-century Lewiston was once dubbed the “Athens of French America”), festivals (like the 1925 snowshoe convention/”beer fest” held openly during Prohibition) and religion — the Church of SS Peter and Paul, an iconic building of the Lewiston-Auburn skyline, was built by 1936 on the “nickels and dimes” of faithful Franco-American parishioners. (It was reclassified as a basilica in 2005.)

A child at an unknown textile mill in Lewiston, circa 1900. From “The Franco-Americans of Lewiston-Auburn,” courtesy of the University of Southern Maine, Franco-American Collection.

The book proceeds into the present, finishing with the reaction of the Franco-American community to the influx of African refugees (some of whom speak French) and the gubernatorial race between incumbent Paul LePage and U.S. Rep. Mike Michaud — two Franco-American candidates. “We really took it right up to the wire, considering we were writing about things that were happening the week before,” Myall says.

The co-authors, who had previously worked together on the board of the Franco-American Collection, enjoyed the collaboration. “We complemented each other nicely between a historical perspective — my primary interest — and Mary’s interest in the language and culture,” Myall says.

Myall and Rice-DeFosse brought to the book research that dovetailed to form a complete portrait of the Franco-American community.

Rice-DeFosse has worked with �ֲ���ý students, particularly those in her course titled “French in Maine,” for years to collect the oral histories of local Franco-American residents. While the interviews started as a way for her students to practice their French language in the community, they evolved into an indispensable source of history.

“I have a record of a number of people’s lives, their life stories…that was the reason we were able to do the book,” Rice-DeFosse says.

Myall brought his knowledge of the huge amounts of information housed in the Franco-American Collection. The collection, the University of Southern Maine’s store of Franco-American archival material (and one of the largest in the state of Maine), contains a plethora of primary sources — old newspapers, diaries, recipe books and thousands of images. Most are donations.

“We really appreciate [that] the information we were getting came mostly from the community in one form or another,” Myall says.

That is what makes The Franco-Americans of Lewiston-Auburn not only a compelling read for American history buffs, but a source of empowerment for the community itself.

“A lot of people say, ‘Thank you for recognizing our history and writing down these things that we all knew, but nobody has written down before,'” says Myall of reactions to the book. “But then there’s also another group of people��— or the same group of people — who sometimes say, ‘This is great; I never even knew this about my own heritage.'”

The potential audience for this book extends well beyond the Lewiston-Auburn city limits. Myall encourages anyone from Maine and New England, a region rich in Franco-American influence, to read about this important population.

Rice-DeFosse sees connections in this history for the study of all people who live in border communities, “who in fact are fully American, in every sense, but who also have retained culture and sometimes language over generations.”

Mary Rice-DeFosse, professor of French and Francophone studies. (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ���ý College)

Community engagement makes �ֲ���ý distinctive — and the Department of French and Francophone Studies has, in turn, found distinctive ways to put that ethos into practice.

“We have a particular opportunity because �ֲ���ý is in a French-speaking community,” says Mary Rice-DeFosse, professor of French and Francophone studies.

Since arriving at �ֲ���ý 30 years ago, Rice-DeFosse has often aligned her curriculum with the interests of that community, one first defined by its French Canadian origins and now influenced by French-speakers from such African nations as Djibouti, Chad and Congo.

Rice-DeFosse’s achievements in community-engaged teaching have been, you might say, formidable. The Maine Legislature recently honored that track record by inducting her into the Maine Franco-American Hall of Fame, where she joins such notables as the late Lewiston politician Georgette Berubé, sociologist Madeleine Giguère and Yvon Labbé, a champion of Maine’s Franco culture.

Rice-DeFosse was inducted in a March 19 ceremony at the State House. She was nominated for the Hall of Fame by state Rep. Margaret Rotundo, director of policy and strategic initiatives for �ֲ���ý’ Harward Center for Community Partnerships, and chosen by the state’s Franco-American legislators.

“I was very moved,” says Rice-DeFosse. “There are so many people in the community who are deserving of that kind of an award, and it’s unusual for people who are not of French heritage.” (Her husband, the late John DeFosse, was of French descent.)

One of Rice-DeFosse’s best-known community projects is a video documentary depicting women who wove an early and important social safety net in the Twin Cities. Les Soeurs Grises / The Grey Nuns: Elles sont venues, elles ont servi / They Came, They Served was completed in 2012, and is part of in Lewiston (now known as the Franco Center).

A branch of the Sisters of Charity of St. Hyacinthe, the Grey Nuns came to Lewiston in 1878 on the heels of French Canadian immigrants drawn by the thousands to work in Twin City mills. The nuns established the city’s first hospital (today’s St. Mary’s Regional Health Center) along with a nursing home, two orphanages and a school for nurses, all just blocks from �ֲ���ý.

The Grey Nuns draws heavily on interviews, several conducted by �ֲ���ý students, with former residents of the orphanages and other community members, as well as footage of members of the order provided by St. Mary’s. Rice-DeFosse researched, wrote, narrated and co-produced the film, created at the behest of the Franco Center and in collaboration with St. Mary’s Health System, the contemporary descendant of the nuns’ good works.

“I learned an enormous amount about what these women had done,” she says. “How incredibly innovative they were, in terms of delivering health care services, care for the elderly and care for children without parents and or whose parents were working.”

Rice-DeFosse’s department, in recent years and with funding from the Harward Center and the Maine Campus Compact, has restructured its curriculum to incorporate community-engaged learning at every course level.

“In the early levels, it’s just an introduction to the local community, and the fact that there are French speakers here,” she explains. More advanced students have done translations for community-related websites and museum exhibitions, and have conducted oral histories with local residents for an ongoing project related to Rice-DeFosse’s course “French in Maine.”

“I think that introduction to the notion that there are different communities within this community is important,” Rice-DeFosse says. “And we’ve found that students, having been introduced to community-engaged learning here, are able to take that experience abroad.” Students frequently design and conduct community research projects while studying abroad, often in Africa.

Community engagement has its impact on campus as well as in the community. “I like to develop in students the appreciation that there are many ways of thinking,” says Rice-DeFosse, “and the ability to think critically inside of the French language, because it immediately draws students outside of themselves.”

For students undertaking community-engaged learning in the context of French and francophone studies, the language “is no longer kind of a classroom game, about memorizing words and parroting,” as it might be at the high school level.

“Because we live in Lewiston-Auburn, there is something about the language and the cultural differences that make what we are teaching real,” says Rice-DeFosse. “So that connection is, I think, truly vital.”

Mary Rice-DeFosse, professor of French, lives and works in a state in which 40 percent of the residents claim French heritage. It’s no coincidence, then, that Franco-American Maine literature and culture are an important part of her work.

“My students have been doing oral histories in French with local residents for more than 10 years, especially in courses like ‘Oral French’ and ‘French in Maine,’ ” Rice-DeFosse says. Her students have also engaged in research and service-learning connected with Maine Francophones.

Rice-DeFosse enjoys her role as a mentor. This year she celebrated the achievement of Christine Quinan ’00, whose essay about French feminist Simone DeBeauvoir, written under Rice-DeFosse’s direction, garnered the 2000 Undergraduate Essay Award from the journal Women in French Studies. Published by Women in French — an organization affiliated with the Modern Language Association — the journal recently re-appointed Rice-DeFosse as a member of its expanded editorial board.