ilingualism.
Pedagogically, the goal of language instruction, then, ought not to be the achievement of "perfect French"; rather, it should aim at "notional/functional" competency, in the sense of a syllabus "organized on the basis of the sentence meanings and functions which a learner needs in order to communicate--notions such as time, location, and quantity, and functions such as requesting and persuading" (Crystal, 1992, pp 271-2). Such syllabus is neither "structural" (i.e. in graded series of grammatical structures) nor "situational" (i.e. in series of language-using situations).
According to Grew & Olivier (1986), what is most important is to get the learner to think in French, so that he gets to understand the native speaker and respond appropriately without resorting to mental translation. Hence, teaching/learning never uses translation as a method of learning. Translating is a specialized professional skill best left to advanced students who aim at becoming translators. Opinions are divided as to whether one should ever use the native lang
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