Indo-Chinese immigrants to Western countries often have some knowledge of French. When the language of the community to which they have come is related to French, favorable and unfavorable language learning situations may arise. In the case of immigration to English-speaking countries, some specific lexical transfer processes may occur because French and English are lexically interrelated. The relevance of this situation to the teaching of English to this category of language learners is considered. Eighty-eight subjects, recent immigrants to the U.S. with minimal English knowledge, read Vietnamese sentences and were asked to demonstrate English and French knowledge of a designated word within each sentence, by means of a translation task. For cases of French knowledge, transfer effects of lexical items seemed to overrule the effect of word knowledge. Subjects demonstrated better knowledge of English-French cognates than formal contrasts, and better knowledge of formal contrasts than misleading cognates. Both recognition and production of English were considered. Psycholinguistic and linguistic aspects of the problem are discussed. General suggestions are made for teaching a third language when it is linguistically related to a second language, but unrelated to the person's first language. (Author/AMH)