erent set of problems: "Students of English as a second language lack confidence in their ability to use idiomatic expressions. Even those fluent in English are often puzzled by the idiomatic structure of the language. And if they steer clear of idiomatic usage, their speech and writing tend to become formal and stilted" (Whitford & Dixon, 1973, n.p.). Clearly, English is probably the language richest in idioms and idiomatic expressions. Without a certain command of what used to be called (and still is by some linguists) "idiotisms", there is little meaningful and culture-bound communication possible today.
Yet, what most challenges learners of the other's language is pronunciation. The vagaries of the English spelling system already constitutes a baffling stumbling block in the acquisition of speech--not helped in the least by the wide variety of English as spoken from England to Australia via the United States of America and countless other regions where English is either the first or the second vehicular language. French too presents a wide spectrum of dialects, idioms, and accents, as it is spoken in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, the Caribbeans, several Indian Ocean islands, and the ex-colonies in Africa and the Middle East. The facts that some ten percent of English words are French and that an increasing number of English loan words have "corrupted" (in French purists' view) modern French are of little help to those learning the other's language; Both insouciantly massacre the other's language.
TEACHING FRENCH TO ENGLISH SPEAKERS
Assuming that the native English-speaking learner is past the age of fifteen or so, and however fluent he becomes in the target language, he will have a different representation of French than that of a French monolingual speaker. Whatever level of competency is achieved, transfer operates in both directions (Bialystok & Hakuta, 1994, p. 115), and code-switching will be a feature of b...