During the Second World War, Yale's Professor Emeritus of Romance Languages, Jean Boorsch, had produced for the AmericanASTP and the Navy V-12s 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 charactersMireille 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.
Each episode is half an hour long. Early 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 and his French love interest Mireille Belleau.
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. With the exception of a brief English language introduction at the beginning of each episode, the series is conducted entirely in French.
In 1990, three female students at Yale University filed a grievance claiming that the university's introductory French course was sexist in its use of the French in Action television series. In particular, the students objected to watching a scene in which the character Jean-Pierre harasses Mireille as she sits in a park and then being required to "pretend you were trying to pick up a pretty woman in a park." Some also objected to camera angles focusing on Mireille's legs, or breasts when she isn't wearing a bra. Its creator, Prof. Capretz, a French native who has taught at Yale since 1956, said "wouldn't change any of it." To teach French effectively, he said, "you have to make the students observe the language being used by native speakers, in real situations." In response, the French department at Yale determined that the course would be changed by developing supplementary materials to be used in the course. However, the television programs themselves were not altered.
