ON THE CONTEXTUALIZATION OF PHONETIC EXERCISES IN COURSES OF FRENCH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE BASED ON THE ACTION-ORIENTED APPROACH

Abstract

Our research includes an analysis of the contextualization of phonetic exercises in five courses of French as a foreign language which were published between 2011 and 2018 following the principles of the communicative and action-oriented approaches and relying on the guidelines of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages ​​(CEFR) of 2001 (Nouveau Rond-Point 1, Écho A1, Saison 1, Cosmopolite 1 and Défi 1). The goal of our research is twofold. On the one hand, we would like to find out what importance is given to phonetic exercises in each of the mentioned courses. On the other hand, our goal is to establish the extent to which phonetic exercises are used in the context, bearing in mind the fact that it is context that gets great attention within CEFR, in every form of use and learning a foreign language. For the purposes of facilitating the comparison of the obtained results and better understanding of the contextualization of the phonetic exercises in the selected courses, our analysis is based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria. A total of 370 phonetic exercises were recorded in our corpus, 191 of which were in the analyzed textbooks and 179 being in the complementary workbooks. Based on the obtained results, we can draw at least three conclusions. First of all, we can notice that phonetics is gaining more and more importance in modern courses of French as a foreign language. Our results show that only the courses Nouveau Rond-Point 1 and Défi 1 do not feature phonetic exercises in their textbooks, but this comes from completely different reasons. While in Nouveau Rond-Point 1 (2011) the role of phonetics seems to be marginalized, in Défi 1 (2017) the lack of these exercises in the textbook is compensated by the abundant additional material: the short videos available on the publisher's website in which the phonetic material is explained in a contextualized way (through animations, metaphors, comparisons) and it is quite thematically harmonized with the lesson referred to. In addition, the workbook of the course Défi 1 was noted to feature the largest number of phonetic exercises of all the analyzed courses, and a significant part of those exercises was also contextualized. As for our next conclusion, the fact is imposed that there is a noticeable tendency towards contextualization of phonetic exercises in modern courses of French as a foreign language. The authors of the courses achieve this in various ways – among other things, by inserting phonetic exercises into other exercises of oral comprehension or expression, as is the case with the course Saison 1. Finally, we can conclude that in modern courses of French as a foreign language more attention is paid to how to motivate students to do as many phonetic exercises as possible. In order to avoid the monotony of mechanical repetition exercises, and in order for students to be more active and better understand phonetic phenomena, there are additional audio-visual materials, learning through play, phonetic exercises within oral comprehension and expression exercises available to them. All this encourages us to say that phonetics today is far from being marginalized, as was the case at the very beginning of the introduction of a communicative approach in learning/teaching French as a foreign language.