Pearl City students
traveling in France

By Crystal Kua
Star-Bulletin

French language teacher Mary Anne Smith asks her new students the same question each year: "What do you know about France?"

Two words frequently come up as a reply: french fries.

"It's funny, and it's cute but what do they know about France?" asked Smith, who has taught at various schools.

As more public schools cut French as a foreign language, more students won't learn about faraway places, Smith contends.

Smith, who now teaches at Pearl City High School, left Sunday with 36 of her students on a 12-day trip to experience France firsthand and to bring awareness to the plight of French language programs in public schools.

"We cannot get the realism in Hawaii like we can for other languages so since we can't really bring France here, we can take them to France," Smith said. "It's really exposing them to the other side of the world."

Anita Bruce, a Department of Education specialist in world languages, said an estimated 25 of 40 high schools offer French.

"I have a sense that the numbers are declining," Bruce said. "We do not have French at every high school."

Smith said she has students who attend Pearl City High to take French because their school doesn't offer it.

"It's actually based on student registration," Bruce said. "If there's insufficient interest in any class, the class won't be offered next year."

William Burgwinkle, chairman of French in the University of Hawaii's European Language Division, said Hawaii's "economic pressures" should not be the sole determinant in deciding which languages should be offered in high schools.

"We should not limit our future options by concentrating only on tourism and the languages most represented by a profile of current tourists," Burgwinkle said.

French is also pertinent to Pacific studies because French is spoken in Tahiti, New Caledonia and French Polynesia, Smith and Burgwinkle said.

Smith said another reason she believes there's been a decline in enrollment is because of the Department of Education policy to combine different levels of a foreign language into one class when enrollment in one level is small, which can frustrate students who are at various stages of study.

Burgwinkle said research shows that a significant factor in the improvement of SAT verbal test scores is the study of a foreign language.

"Since 40 percent of English vocabulary comes directly from French, it is not surprising that the study of French has shown to be particularly valuable in increasing vocabulary and mastering structure," Burgwinkle said.

The trip to France came about after several fund-raisers, parental contributions and a $1,700 donation from Alliance Francaise of Hawaii -- a group dedicated to the promotion of the French language and culture.

"They're (the students) really going to have to put their language skills to work," Smith said.