The students in Tom Mitchell's second-period Chinese class get the joke. He's explaining the Chinese word for "American food" - an intricate symbol that, properly drawn, depicts a fort or fortress.

"Han bao," several students say.

Han bao? A Chinese fort? What does that have to do with American food?

No, it's not a White Castle. Han bao simply sounds a lot like Hamburg, whence comes the word hamburger.

High school kids nationwide may someday get the joke, too, as the College Board begins offering advanced placement (AP) courses in Mandarin Chinese.

Along with a new AP course in Italian, announced in September, the Chinese course represents the first new AP language offering in more than 40 years. For years, students have been able to earn college credit in Spanish, French, German and Latin.

The new course, scheduled for fall 2006, comes at a time when Chinese is becoming one of the fastest-growing foreign languages in the USA. Though few reliable figures exist on high school enrollment in Chinese, the Modern Language Association reports that Chinese-language enrollment on college campuses last year was up 20% over 1998.

The association, a group of teachers and scholars that promotes the study of languages and literature, says Chinese now accounts for about 2.4% of foreign language courses taken on college campuses, up from 0.4% in 1968. Interest in Asian languages has grown rapidly, says Rosemary Feal, the association's executive director, while enrollment in German and French have dropped.

Feal and others attribute much of the interest in Asian cultures to the growing global economy and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. She says teenagers are beginning to realize that the world is "a smaller place."

"The students think - and they're right - that they need to know a lot of languages," Feal says.

Youming Che, a Chinese instructor at The Latin School of Chicago, a private K-12 school, says many students take his courses to have something distinctive - and difficult - on their transcript.

"It is challenging, but students taking the language gradually become more confident," he says.

Marty Abbott, president of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, which represents secondary school language teachers, says colleges look favorably upon students who make it all the way to the AP language exams.

"When students can stick with it to an advanced level, it indicates that they have the ability to do college work," she says.

In spite of - or perhaps because of - the recent push in many public schools to focus more closely on basic math and reading skills, advocates say they're seeing increased interest in foreign languages.

"Parents realize this is important," Abbott says.

The courses also serve as touchstones for students whose native languages are not English. Many of these students can speak these languages - often fluently - but that's where their fluency ends.

"I go back to Taiwan a lot, and I can't read or write Chinese," says Jessica Yeh, 15, a sophomore in one of Mitchell's classes at Marshall High School, just inside Washington, D.C.'s Capital Beltway.

Though nearly all of Mitchell's students are U.S.-born, most have roots in Taiwan, mainland China, Korea, Vietnam or Cambodia. Jessica, who converses easily, says she still has trouble reading Chinese newspapers but can now read song lyrics.

"It's exciting," she says. "It's a lot of fun."

The new course comes after lobbying from the Chinese government, which will underwrite the costs of developing the coursework and test, and of training teachers.

The AP announcement also took on potent political symbolism: The announcement was made Friday, just before the start of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's official visit to the USA.

Developing the exam probably will cost about $1.4 million.

The College Board's decision to offer an AP course in Italian in fall 2005 was the result, in part, of a lobbying effort by Italian diplomats and former New York first lady Matilda Cuomo.

College Board officials anticipate that as many as 3,000 students will sign up for the Chinese course in the first year - a modest beginning, considering that more than 1 million high school students take AP courses. But it compares favorably to other AP languages. Only about 4,000 students took the AP German test last spring.

According to the 2000 U.S. Census, Chinese-Americans are the largest Asian group in the USA, at more than 2.7 million. While about 1.5 billion people worldwide speak Chinese, fewer than 50,000 U.S. students study it, the College Board says.

But about 100 high schools have strong Chinese language programs, most of them in schools on the East and West coasts.

"There are more programs than you might suspect in the United States right now," says Lee Jones, a vice president at the College Board.

Officials say students also can look forward to AP courses in Japanese and Russian.

It will be three years before the first AP Chinese classes will be offered while schools find and train teachers.

"They're not flocking in, but we can meet the demands that we have so far," Abbott says.

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