frnphonetics

//Post information, resources, and tips for teaching French phonetics here.//

French is a very difficult language to pronounce for Anglophones, especially because there are so many different vowels (around 16), many of which we don't have in English. In order to help students learn to distinguish and pronounce the different sounds, and therefore improve their pronunciation, we teach phonetics to the advanced level classes (French 3 through AP).

When I teach phonetics, we start with the open and closed syllables, consonants and basic vowels, and then get into the more complex issues of nasal vowels, semi-vowels, etc. Every week for the first semester we learned one or two phonemes, and practiced making the sounds and transcribing words phonetically. I will be posting the most of written phonetic transcription exercises here. You'll notice that they begin with mono-syllabic words and gradually become more complex with sentences and full paragraphs.

A note of caution about teaching phonetics: the class that struggles the most with transcription is my French 3 class. I believe this is simply because before learning phonetics, they would see a word in French and try to apply what they've learned about connections between English orthography and pronunciation, which doesn't work very well. In order for these students to understand what the words sounds like and make new connections between spelling and sound, they need to hear it MULTIPLE times and shown the connection i.e. major scaffolding. I would not teach the phonetic alphabet or transcription to any class lower than 3. user:StephanieP



When I first started teaching phonetics, I gave some examples of what I DIDN'T want the students to sound like i.e. typical American pronunciation (destruction) of the language. I showed the following clips from youtube. The clips were originally commericials for MTV in France. They have non-French speakers reading a script, and it's pretty funny. I showed the clips to my students and we identified and discussed the numerous pronunciation errors.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lA6ausbdz88 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmtmZXy2FSY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRq7ouRBHjk - Video has been removed from YouTube user:chericem1

Note: The last line of each video contains sexual references that would be considered inappropriate by many parents and schools, so if you do decide to use these, be sure to stop the video prior to that section. user:chericem1


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