Penobscot School Expands

Language learning center in Rockland, Maine names new CEO. Board approves new institute - Center for Heritage Language Reacquisition

Penobscot School Expands Program

   Penobscot School Trustees have announced a new organizational structure which allows for expansion of the Schools foreign language and cultural exchange offerings. Founded by French teacher Julia Schulz and lawyer Joe Steinberger as a nonprofit school, Penobscot School has served the Mid-coast community with weekly foreign language classes and hosted adults from 47 countries for English immersion for sixteen years. The hiring of David Clough as Executive Director in July 2001 took the School to a new level. Now the Trustees have named Clough CEO, and he will take on the duties of Founding President Schulz in the day-to-day management of the Schools core programs. In addition, long-time German instructor Sally Burtnette-Leser has been hired as Acting Academic Director to replace Schulz in the supervision of teachers and curriculum. These changes will, in turn, allow Schulz to pursue in greater depth a project she began three years ago as she becomes Director of Penobscot Schools new institute: The Center for Heritage Language Reacquisition.
   The purpose of the new institute, according to Chairman of the Board Hugh Bay" Bigelow, is to assist people in reawakening their 'hidden or 'lost heritage language. As Americans, except for Native peoples, we have all come from some other country," Bigelow said, My mother is Japanese, and though I grew up in my fathers hometown of Boston, I was lucky to be able to learn to speak Japanese by taking trips to Japan and studying the language at Harvard. So, I have kept my mothers native language. Lots of people in the U.S. spoke a language as children and lost it when they started school and everything was in English."
   The first project of the Schools new institute will be the reacquisition of French by New Englands descendants of French-Canadian immigrants. Schulz, who has been studying Franco-Americans and Acadians in Maine since 1980, estimates there might be as many as 500,000 New Englanders who spoke French as their first language and began to lose it when they entered kindergarten. They are the descendants of the approximately one million French-Canadians who came to work primarily in textile mills throughout New England between the 1830s and 1933.    
   A twenty-year veteran of language teaching, Schulz is out to test a hypothesis reported in the popular press regarding early language development in infants. It seems that a young childs brain builds structures in accordance with the language(s) the child hears," Schulz said, and some aspects of the language are 'hard-wired in the childs brain. If this is true, it means that the persons first language never really disappears-maybe it just goes to sleep, and, with the right encouragement, can wake up again."
   For the past three years, Schulz has observed the truth of this idea in her work with Franco-Americans in Waterville, Maine, a town whose population at one point was 40% French-Canadian immigrants. In 1999 and 2000, in collaboration with filmmaker Ben Levine and Watervilles Railroad Square Cinema, Schulz showed French-language films produced in Quebec and helped lead post-film discussions in both French and English. According to audience members, the films tapped into a growing perception that the French-Canadian language and culture were dying. At the cinema, French was spoken in public for the first time in Waterville in over thirty years. The two Franco-American Heritage Film Festivals, funded by the Wallace Readers Digest arts initiative of the Maine Community Foundation, led local residents Linda Gerard der Simonian and Sylvanne Pontin, in partnership with Schulz, to create monthly and then weekly gatherings of Waterville-area adults for the purpose of recovering the hidden French language of their childhood.
   Termed 'the movement to revive French in Central Maine, by one Boston Globe reporter, the success of French reacquisition in Waterville moved Schulz and Penobscot School Trustees to create a reacquisition institute which has as its goal the creation of a model curriculum for reawakening a lost or dormant first language. If the model works with Franco-Americans, Schulz reasons, it can be applied to other minority-language populations. According to Schulz, Many of our students in language courses at Penobscot School are already studying so that they can better understand their family heritage, whether the language is Swedish, Finnish, Italian, or others. They have been trying to recall their first languages for the personal satisfaction it brings and sometimes in order to re-connect with family members in the country their ancestors came from."
   Bigelow noted that the new institute gives Penobscot School the opportunity to reach out to whole communities of non-traditional language enthusiasts, not only in the Mid-coast area but all around New England and, potentially, to make a real contribution in the area of language learning. And," he concludes, in this era of increased globalization of commerce and communication, it can only benefit the balance of trade if more people here build stronger language skills, including those heritage-language speakers, for whom re-learning is so much faster and easier than starting from scratch."
   Commenting on the new structure for Penobscot School and his new role within it, David Clough said, I intend to do my very best to carry on the traditions which make this school special and to forge new paths to greater enhance our commitment to language learning and international exchange."
   Those seeking more information about courses and related activities at Penobscot School as well as the new Center for Heritage Language Reacquisition may contact the School at: 207-594-1084 or visit the web site: www.languagelearning.org   

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