Parents across the nation are rushing their children to language immersion schools, hoping that their child will someday become fluent in another language. For those of us not in language immersion, however, a foreign language Advanced Placement (AP) course is the next best thing. Therefore, it is strange that the College Board is deciding to eliminate three AP language courses after the 2008-2009 academic year. Latin Literature, French Literature and Italian Language and Culture will all be discontinued. The elimination of French Literature, the only aforementioned course that Gunn has, will affect almost 200 students who would be eligible to take the class. The College Board should not discontinue AP Language or Literature courses because doing so undermines the purpose of learning a new language: gaining a deeper understanding of a particular language and culture.

The College Board says it is eliminating these courses due to the lack of interest in the subjects and the rising costs of the exams. However, these reasons will not cut it. According to the AP Data Reports, 2068 students took the AP French Literature exam in 2007, which is a 27 percent increase compared to 1996. Last year, no AP language course had a decrease in enrollment. Clearly, more students are becoming interested in taking AP language courses, not fewer. If one looks at the sheer number of AP exams taken, Japanese Language and Culture has a significantly lower number compared to French Literature and Latin Literature. If the College Board decides to retrace its steps, AP Japanese Language and Culture will be eliminated as well.

The “rising costs” rationale is also a fallacy. According to The Washington Post, College Board vice president Trevor Packer said the College Board plans to increase the budget for AP Language courses from $8 million to $12 million in the coming year. If the College Board is going to allocate an additional $4 million dollars, how does it not have the funds to administer AP exams in those three AP Language courses? Furthermore, an AP Literature exam is actually cheaper to administer and to correct than an AP Language exam because the literature exam does not include a speaking component.

What is most bewildering is that only College Board President Gaston Caperton and the Board of Trustees, which consits of 31 people, were involved in making the decision. No language teachers were consulted before the courses were cut. When French teachers and students across the country inundated College Board members with letters asking them to reconsider the decision, they gave no response. Another shocker is that

College Board revamped the curriculum for AP French Literature just last year. AP French Literature teachers spent their summers preparing for the new curriculum, only to find out a few months later that the lesson plans would be useless afer 2009. Schools also had to buy class sets of the new books on the designated curriculum. Not only was it a waste of money for the school, it also wasted time and energy of French teachers across the nation.

Moreover, literature is an integral part of any language. Students are able to step outside of grammar and vocabulary and learn more about the history, culture, art, music and social structures of countries that speak the language. AP Literature has the academic rigor of a college course and pushes students to read and analyze text. Students find the class more rewarding because they get a deeper understanding of the material.

AP Literature students have a burning passion for the language. The College Board is depriving these fervent students of the opportunity to reach the highest level of achievement for foreign language students as well as the chance to be challenged intellectually. Plus, the exam component helps students strive to work harder. If students do well on the exam, they may receive college credit, which saves them money and time in college. Some Gunn alumni who took AP French Literature were put into junior level French courses in college, and many of them chose to study abroad or combine French with another major. According to The Yale Daily News, both students and faculty of French at Yale University believe that students are more prepared to study French Literature in college if they took AP French Literature in high school.

During high school, many students learn a second language. However, only a handful of them become fluent because continually using a language is imperative to achieving fluency. The elimination of these AP courses will disable some students from having the chance to take a more advanced language course. In turn, they may have a gap of a year or two in which they are not exposed to the language until college.

The College Board added AP courses in Chinese Language and Culture and Japanese Language and Culture in 2006, and plans to add Russian Language and Culture in the future. (Watch out, AP Spanish Literature!) Adding new languages should be lauded, but it should not be done at the expense of eliminating other courses. The College Board could offer an AP for all of the languages in the world and eliminate all the AP Literature courses, but what good would it do? No one would be fully fluent in any language, and no one would develop the same fervor that they would attain from being in an AP Literature class. The zeal that students get when they discover something that is “deep” when they read and interpret literature in the original text would be lost in translation forever.

The College Board should reinstate AP Latin Literature, French Literature and Italian Language and Culture, so that students studying these languages will have the opportunity to further improve their language skills in today’s global world.