Reconsidering the authenticity of speech in French language teaching: theory, data, methodology, and practice

Abstract

In recent years, following the development of new technologies and new methods of speech data collection and analysis, the spoken French language has been the focus of several innovative large-scale corpus-based research projects. This chapter looks at whether these new perspectives and findings have since been reflected in French language teaching methodologies and materials and whether they have resulted in a more ecological approach. It presents an overview of theories and methodologies for the teaching of spoken French, articulated with the notion of authenticity in language teaching materials. The paper then confronts those theories to data and practice: it reports on a survey of speech samples found in teaching packs currently used to teach French to adult beginners, in France and in the UK. It compares the linguistic and acoustic features of dialogues found in the packs with those of equivalent naturally-occurring samples. It also examines how phonology and listening comprehension are approached in the same teaching packs.

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