Turkish university students'problems of pronunciation in french language

This research was performed so as to examine the French pronunciation problems encountered by Turkish university students learning French. The population of the study was composed of the students who attended the French preparatory classes of Gazi University in 2006-2007 academic years. The students were asked to read a text selected on the basis of certain criteria from the textbook "Taxi l" - which had been taught in conversation classes since 2005- and their was voice recorded in order to determine the problems. Examining the recording, the pronunciation mistakes they frequently did during reading were spotted and classified, the issues that mostly caused problems to Turkish students were determined and discussed with examples. The paper established the fact that Turkish learners' problems mainly stemmed from the differences between Turkish and French sound/spelling systems and that the learners did not know the differences sufficiently. It also suggested that false interference caused by English, which the students had previously studied, was also influential and that phonetics courses as well as phonetics exercises were not sufficient.