Using the vocabulary she has learned in her level one French class, eighth-grader Ainsley Gorringe said she was able to order “the best creme brulee I have ever tasted” from a native French speaker, Sophie Garaix, owner of My French Delicacies.

The exchange was part of the Jordan School District French Fair organized by middle school French teachers.

“It is for students to have an opportunity to do some real world tasks in the target language, learn a little bit about culture, and just have an opportunity to meet other students who are also learning the language and getting to use that basic language that they've been studying,” Sunset Ridge Middle French teacher Susan Robinson said.

Because most of her friends at Hidden Valley Middle take Spanish, Ainsley said it was nice to meet other French speakers.

 “I was able to actually have conversations with people, and other students taught me things that I hadn't learned and I taught them things they hadn’t quite learned,” Ainsley said.

About 150 students from five middle schools learned about French culture and practiced their language skills in a variety of activities at the fair, held March 13.

Hidden Valley Middle School French teacher Arielle Plétain brought her most motivated first year students to spark their curiosity and let them see there are many other students learning French.

“They had to commit to speaking French while they were here—not easy for students who just started French in August,” she said. “But I was just super impressed with the willingness of the students to participate in the activities.”

Eighth-grader Hudson Reid said he made new friends and learned new vocabulary.

“It was a ton of fun,” he said. “On the bus ride there we were nervous, but we had a great time.”

Ainsley said it was challenging to say everything in French.

“I liked that they're forcing us to speak in French, but I will say Google Translate has been my friend,” she said. She was relieved that students were allowed to speak English during the lunch break.

Emil Peterson and Avery Pitcher, ninth-graders in the French Dual Language Immersion program at Sunset Ridge Middle, enjoyed the opportunity to use their language skills outside of the classroom. They said the fair was more fun than sitting in a classroom conjugating verbs.

French students used to attend a language fair held at BYU, but when it was discontinued, Jordan District French language teachers organized their own. They plan to hold it every year.

“Kids need good memories, a variety of positive learning opportunities outside of the classroom and opportunities to connect/interact with people,” Oquirrh Hills Middle French teacher Julie LaFranca said.

This kind of gamification is becoming more common in education, said Victor Neves, French teacher at West Hills Middle School. “The kids learn, without feeling like they’re doing a learning activity necessarily,” he said.

The language teachers arranged a French pen pal exchange for their students to keep in touch with the friends they made at the fair, while also practicing their French writing skills. Neves said this will help students from different middle schools who will feed into the same high school because they will already know the kids in their high school French classes.

One of the goals of the French Fair was to encourage students to continue their French language studies.

“We're hoping that it really shows them how useful the language is and helps them have a greater desire to continue on in that language, to learn more and get to a higher level of fluency so that they could do a lot more things,” Robinson said. “Learning a language opens up the world to see that there are people that live different ways than we live and for the students to understand that and to expand their world that much. I think that's one of the biggest goals of language classes, and this [fair] helps them see the possibilities.”