The Spread of the French Language and Culture in Lithuania: History and the Present

Summary. The purpose of this article is to describe the situation of the dissemination of French language and culture in Lithuania through teaching of French as foreign language having the status of a language of culture and education. Descriptive and statistical methodology is used. After reviewing and explaining the history and the present of spread of French language and culture in Lithuania, we focus on the teaching of the French language in Lithuania today and its status of second foreign language. The authors used the descriptive analysis of the teaching of French in Lithuanian schools. For this purpose we use statistical data on the teaching of the French language in the Lithuanian education system before and after World War II until today. The statistical tables provided by the Ministry of Education show that in Lithuania the number of students learning French continues to decline in favor of English. Currently in Lithuania there are 50 colleges (including 15 national universities, seven private universities, 16 state colleges and 12 private colleges). All receive a contingent of students who have completed high school, after 12 years of studies. So distribution of students learning various foreign languages in colleges is similar to that in secondary schools. In all of these mentioned colleges the French is taught as one of foreign languages (1st, 2nd or 3rd). Five national universities train specialists of FFL (French as a foreign language). Every year, they prepare about a hundred graduates who work in different cultural sectors of the country. In 2005, the Francophone institutions have agreed Lithuania as an associate member. Hopefully, in the face of global Anglomania, the outlook for the dissemination of the language and French culture in Lithuania is not discouraging.

Keywords: francophone, teaching of foreign language, language statuses, didactics.