Spoken French, variations and didactics of pronunciation in the teaching-learning of French as a foreign language. Considerations and proposals

This paper examines how variation in spoken French is taken into account in corrective phonetics courses. A learner of French as a foreign language, anywhere in the world, should be competent in any Francophone area. Even in metropolitan France, however, pronunciation is subject to both geographical and social variation as phoneticians have observed and investigated since the 19th century. We therefore focus on the teaching and learning of pronunciation (corrective phonetics), with an emphasis on this variation. We question the accepted wisdom in the field and its implications, alongside the limitations of existing teaching resources. The reduced role of phonetics in the FLE classroom, and dependence on a large number of exercises rather than on more communicative approaches, lead us to believe that the entire field requires innovation, taking inspiration from the Digital Humanities