French In Action (1987)
This educational series teaches the French language and profiles cultural attributes. No attempt is made to use English in presenting skills and concepts.
From Wikipedia:
French in Action is a French language course, developed by Professor Pierre Capretz of Yale University. The course includes workbooks, textbooks, and a 52-episode television series. The television series - the best-known aspect of the course - was produced in 1987 by WGBH, Yale University, and Wellesley College, and funded by Annenberg/CPB, and since then, has been aired frequently on PBS in the United States, developing a cult following[1] for its romantic comedy segments interspersed among grammar lessons.
Origins:
During the Second World War, Yale's Professor Emeritus of Romance Languages, Jean Boorsch, had produced for the American ASTP (Army Specialized Training Program) and the Navy V-12s (V-12 Navy College Training Program) an approach to oral French component, using an immersion technique that he published in 1944 as the "Méthode Orale de Français", remarkable for its precision. It had two main characters Mireille and Robert. Between 1960 and 1961, Prof. Boorsch and Prof. Capretz worked on an oral method, which was never published, in which they had kept the names of these two characters.
Prof. Capretz maintained these names in tribute to the "Method Boorsch" in each of the versions of his own "methods" before reaching the current FIA. He had the opportunity to progressively develop the characters themselves during this evolution.
Episodes Format:
Each episode is half an hour long. The earliest episodes have four main elements:
A classroom session, featuring Prof. Capretz explaining the basic ideas of the episode to a group of international students.
An excerpt from an ongoing story, filmed especially for the series, and framed as a narrative that Prof. Capretz and his students are inventing in order to practice their French. The story focuses on American student Robert Taylor (played by Charles Mayer) and his French love interest Mireille Belleau (played by Valerie Allain).
Clips from French films and television shows illustrating the new vocabulary words of the lesson.
A brief Guignol-style puppet show recapping some element of the episode's story.
In later episodes, the classroom section is omitted, and the episode begins with the excerpt from the ongoing story.
The series uses context and repetition, rather than translation, to teach the meanings of words; except for the first episode, and a brief English language introduction at the beginning of each subsequent episode, the series is conducted entirely in French.