Most FSI courses use the Programmatic or Basic methodologies which teach the student all the skills necessary to build a strong language foundation. The student sets the pace of the learning process and new material is presented in "frames", one idea at a time. FSI Basic courses also present all essential grammar of a spoken language, samples of speech, explanations of basic language structure, and a variety of practical exercises. Students will be able to converse easily with native speakers and understand native texts upon completion of the course.

Each FSI course comes packaged with cassettes in a binder and a printed textbook with the dialogs from the cassettes and extra activities.