For the past several days, I've been taking a course in French phonetics. Unlike many of the other participants, I have never taken phonetics and for that reason, the material both interests me and makes me anxious. Having taught French for four years now, I am convinced that I need to make pronunciation and intonation a priority. There is little point in being able to formulate grammatically correct sentences if they sound so little like French that no other French speaker can understand them.
And equally important important, along with pronunciation, is requiring that students take the language seriously as a foreign language, and not just as a sort of word puzzle. In a different course in which I'm also enrolled, we have been examining all the material available on the internet for learning French, and it is disappointing to see how much of that material relies on mechanical fill-in-the-blank or multiple choice. Strangeness, irregularity, playfulness, and even confusion are mostly eliminated from such exercises in favor of a clearly isolated goal: the vocabulary of the kitchen or adjectives for describing appearance or relative pronouns or past participle agreement with antecedent objects. Of course we separate things or simplify in order to practice. But when the entire subject is dominated by this strategy, we offer a deformed image of the language. And it is no wonder that advanced students sometimes come to regard anything irregular -- different accents, comedy, incorrect ordinary speech, antiquated expressions -- not with curiousity, but with hostility. They have been prepared for neat, mathematical problems to solve, not for weird, spongy, unreliable reality.
As I look forward to my courses for the coming year, I am planning to include some of the material and practices I'm learning here. But while I usually think about how to make my classes well-organized and efficient, I also want to be sure to have some strangeness built in as well. Strange is good. Strange can even be fun. And ultimately, teaching a strange language is what I'm here for.
In the mean time, I've found that there are many beautifully organized sites for teaching phonetics, and some might even be useful.
For example, the phonetics site based at the Université de Lyon is comprehensive. It includes information on the physical aspects of the sounds, the phonetic symbols, as well as detailed descriptions not only of the sounds of French, but strategies for correcting vowel and consonant production. The same is true of the site at the University of Ottowa. Unfortunately, I have to add that I don't think I would have been able to use these strategies if I hadn't seen someone demonstrate them first.
Another site, simply title Phonétique has excellent exercises which I could imagine assigning to my students. The exercises model the different sounds of French, as well as the use of liaisons. The main disadvantage here is that there are many exercises which rely on listening and then clicking the right answer, so they would quickly become monotonous. And all of the instructions are in French. As a result, I'm not entirely sure how I would use them for a class. I would probably have to introduce them in class, show students how to use them, and then ask them to use them for practice at home.
This site is more promising, since the exercises are more varied, but it definitely requires teaching students the phonetic alphabet, which not everyone is willing to do. Now that I've just said that I want to keep the strangeness of foreign languages, I hesitate at the thought of baffling students with strange symbols, and maybe that's a mistake.
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