Second language study in French universities includes both modern language (literary) and foreign language (communicative) approaches, although teaching is dominated by the literary strand. Traditional educational models based on the transmission of knowledge are unable to accommodate recent progress in our understanding of learning theory, which…

The efforts of a group of French foreign-language educators since 1968 to develop innovative teaching methods are chronicled by three participants and placed in the scientific, historical, and social contexts of the time and the institutions in which the experiments took place. (MSE)