Course Description

Course Name

French Phonetics 4

Session: VPRS1424

Hours & Credits

42 Contact Hours

Prerequisites & Language Level

Note: A placement exam will be required when you arrive on site.

Superior

  • Prior to enrolling in courses at this language level, students must have completed or tested out of a minimum of 2 upper-division college level courses at their home university in the U.S.

High Advanced

  • Prior to enrolling in courses at this language level, students must have completed or tested out of a minimum of five semesters (or eight quarters) at the college level.

Overview

This courses deals with the following points according to their level: presentation and recognition of sounds, articulation and prosody, functioning of French phonetics system. It enables the student to improve their pronunciation, to understand the spoken French, to learn how to pronounce what is written and to write what is
heard.

PROGRAM

Listen properly to produce properly: Study of significant or speech sounds of French:
-Vowels
-Consonants
-Semi-consonants

How do the sounds get organize:
-Transition and liking
-The fall or the hold of the (e)
-Rhythm groups and intonation

At each level, all these points are dealt with (except for the semi-consonants which are not treated at the beginner level).

OBJECTIVES

-At the beginner level, all that matters is the learning of new sounds thanks to discrimination tests (vous/vu//le/les//bon/vont//temps/ton…)
Learning the international phonetic alphabet and rehearsal exercises.
-Correction in the lab.

-At the elementary level, same process of discrimination and rehearsal; it is added with personal productions (finding words which have studied sounds) and we start the spotting of these sounds in short texts.
Correction in the lab.

-At the intermediate level, same process as the previous one with an augmentation of productions (making short sentences with studied sounds); starting short phonetic transcription.
-Correction in the lab.

-At the advanced level, we continue the same process requesting a more expanded production, readout, transcriptions (from a written text) and decoding from a transcribed text in phonetics. Introduction to the notion of the French phonetic system.
-Correction in the lab.

-At the teaching profession level (one-session courses), resumption of all the previous activities to which it will be added the comparison of the phonetic system of mother tongue of a student and French (contrastive phonetics). What to know in this last field and how to teach it.
-Correction in the lab.

*Course content subject to change