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This paper examines the difficulty in reading French experienced by English students at Advanced Subsidiary Level (AS), taken at age 17, and the need for vocabulary learning to assist comprehension. Research has shown that intermediate learners need knowledge of some 5000 word families, and that specifications for the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), taken at age 16, list only some 1600 words. The question of vocabulary acquisition is examined here. Historical methodological precedents for creating understanding of French texts are examined, together with artificial symbolic systems used in past times and today. The paper examines a synthesis of methods and concludes that a mixture of old and new methods may increase students' understanding and ultimately lead to the learning of a greater body of lexis.
