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Alain Thomas

Phonetic norm versus usage in advanced French as a second language

This article is drawn from a large-scale ongoing study on linguistic progress in advanced French as a second language (FL2). The performance of 48 English-speaking students who spent their third year of university in France (the ‘experimental’ group)has been compared to that of 39 classmates who chose to stay and study at home in southern Ontario, Canada (the ‘control’ group).

The analysis presented here will be limited to three morpho-phonemic variables where native speaker usage can differ considerably from official norms, i.e., ‘liaison’, schwa and the negative particle ne. Results generally point to different pronunciation difficulties at the advanced level than at the beginners' level. Also, comparisons between the experimental and the control groups lead to a reappraisal of the notions of ‘norm’ and phonetic ‘progress’ in spoken French.

IRAL - International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, Walter de Gruyter

Print ISSN: 0019-042X
Volume: 42, 10/2004
Pages: 365 - 382

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