Rebecca Valette received her BA in French and History from Mount Holyoke College in 1959, and her PhD in French and German from the University of Colorado in 1963. She taught French at the NATO Defense College in Paris in 1963-1964, and at Wellesley College in 1964-1965. In 1965, Valette joined the Boston College faculty as professor of French and director of the Language Laboratory. She taught courses in foreign language pedagogy, as well as French language and phonetics, and her research focused primarily on applied linguistics, specifically second language testing and acquisition. From 1992 to 1994, she served as President of the American Association of Teachers of French (AATF). A charter member of the Boston College Phi Beta Kappa chapter (1970), she was also instrumental in establishing the Boston College chapter of the French honor society Pi Delta Phi (1997). Pi Delta Phi sponsored the first campus labyrinth in 1999, and Valette spearheaded the planning and implementation of the permanent Memorial Labyrinth at Boston College, dedicated in 2003. She retired in 2003, becoming a professor emerita. Rebecca Valette and her husband Jean-Paul Valette are authors of over twenty widely-used French and Spanish college and secondary school textbooks. They also researched Navajo art with ceremonial themes and have curated three museum exhibits of Yeibichai weavings and published two books on the topic.

Sources:

"Rebecca Valette, Professor Emerita of French," Boston College Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences. https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/morrissey/departments/romance-languages/people/emeriti-emeritae-faculty/Rebecca-Valette.html. Accessed February 20, 2025.

"Rebecca Valette", Coloradan Alumni Magazine. https://www.colorado.edu/coloradan/rebecca-valette. Accessed February 20, 2025.