Contribution to the history of practices of "pronunciation" based on ordinary writing

• Published in: Documents pour l'histoire du francais langue etrangere ou seconde Vol. 50; no. June; pp. 117 - 138
• Main Author: Besse, Henri
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: French
• Published: 01.06.2013
• ISSN: 0992-7654

The teaching of the pronunciation of French as a foreign language (L2) has relied for a long time on rules, which did not dissociate sounds from the letters commonly used to write them. Aimed at helping students to render orally those letters otherwise than they usually did in their mother tongue (L1), these rules were of a contrastive order (L2-L1) and formulated in more or less auditive or articulary terms. While well-studied in the case of the 17th to 19th century L2 French textbooks, those rules were less so concerning those of the 16th century, as well as in those written for students used to non-Latin scripts or alphabets. The aim of the present article is therefore to investigate further than done until now, such as 'phonetic' teaching over the long term (from the Medieval era to this our day) while widening the range of scripts and languages under consideration.