Parlez-vous franais?

It’s difficult at Sam Houston to get a “oui” in response to that question. Why do you suppose this is? Some would speculate that the reason for this is a lack on interest in the French language. Others would argue that because we’re in the south French is less relevant to our everyday lives than perhaps another language.

All of these are perfectly valid answers as to why more people at Sam Houston don’t take French as their foreign language if they’re required. I suppose my real question is: should it matter?

The Department of Foreign Language requires that French minors complete nine advanced hours in addition to the twelve hours of intro and basic conversation classes. This is a very reasonable request, even if the hours cannot be taken concurrently with one another. However, how is one to obtain these extra nine hours if only one advanced class is offered per semester?

This would require that a student come into his second semester freshman year knowing that he would want to take a total of seven French classes in four years. This is an incredibly unrealistic goal to have set for anyone, seeing as students rarely declare a major-much less a minor, as French is not offered as a major-that early.

So, while the requirements are not necessarily cumbersome, the timeline that the department has set is. The problem with this is that were a student to decide to minor in French it would likely cost him or her another semester due to the offering of only advanced course per semester.

Now, it has been argued that the reason for there not being equal support between the foreign languages is because of our geographic location. It is here that I must point out the fact that students rarely stay in the same city that they graduate from. I’d wager a pretty penny that a rather large percentage of Sam Houston’s 17,000+ students will not stay in the general area of Huntsville or the surrounding areas.

Geographic location is irrelevant when discussing broadening a student’s educational and professional horizons. The international language of business is French, and until recently, international politics also widely used French.

At the point in time where courses are not provided to the students, the Department of Foreign Language is hindering its students that wish to pursue careers in international relations, international business, foreign policy, teaching French, the United Nations, language translators, among other fields.

What are we to do? Pick up an English-to-French dictionary and pray that we can get by?

Moving further, this is a university. Its goal is to prepare students for the “real world.” This may be difficult to believe, but there are more languages in the “real world” than English and Spanish.

If the Department of Foreign Language is not going to help broaden a student’s educational experience by learning the language and culture of other people and countries (which coincidentally is the department’s mission statement), then I don’t believe it has any business pretending to support a program that is clearly underrepresented in the university.

So what now? Do those of us yearning to learn a language that isn’t Spanish fend for ourselves? Or can we turn to the place that is supposed to help us. Can we implore the university to offer more foreign language classes for the betterment of its students?

Please, help me Department of Foreign Languages. Aidez-moi, s’il vous plait!