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 for its romantic comedy segments interspersed among grammar lessons. In 2010, Yale University hosted a 25th anniversary reunion in celebration of... the programme's success. During the Second World War, Yale's Professor Emeritus of Romance Languages, Jean Boorsch, had produced for the American ASTP 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 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.
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