A Comparison of the Attitudes of Learners, Instructors, and Native French Speakers About the Pronunciation of French: An Exploratory Study

Abstract: The stereotype has it that native French speakers are annoyed by foreign speakers' errors in pronunciation. The purpose of this pilot study was to assess beliefs about the importance of accurate pronunciation in French held by three different groups: (1) 73 second- and third-semester students of French at a large midwestern research university in the United States, (2) 16 nonnative-speaker instructors of French at the same institution, and (3) 24 native speakers of French living in France. In a fall semester, each of the three groups received near mirror-image versions of a questionnaire, ranging from 33 items (for the learners) to 29 items (for the instructors) to 26 items (for the native French speakers) in true/false format. Acknowledging that attitudes toward foreign accents might be language- and nationality-specific, all questions pertained to Americans speaking French. Percentages were calculated, and corresponding questions on all three questionnaires were grouped according to theme, then compared and cross-referenced with participants' backgrounds. Generally, this study revealed a gap between the attitudes of hypothetical native speakers, promoted in teaching on the one hand, and the attitudes professed by real native speakers on the other hand. The results of this study discredit the myth that native French speakers have a low tolerance for an American accent in French. Instructors, and nonnative speaker instructors specifically, need to project more realistic goals and refrain from misinforming their students that a perfect native-like pronunciation is vital to successful communication with native speakers. Key words: attitudes, beliefs, cultural assumptions, French pronunciation, stereotypes Language: French Introduction Research on beliefs about foreign language learning has shown that learners (Horwitz, 1985, 1988; Kern, 1995) and their instructors (Kern, 1995) tend to think that it is important and necessary to express oneself in a second or foreign language (L2) with an excellent accent.1 Indeed, these researchers and others (Mantle-Bromley, 1995) have discovered in the course of their investigations that some students also believe that nothing should be said in the foreign language until it can be said correctly. For some, good pronunciation indicates a learner's level of achievement in the target language. But is a native-like accent really essential for students to interact successfully in the target language? This exploratory study was conducted in an attempt to investigate this question and with the understanding that attitudes toward foreign accents might be language- and nationality-specific. The study set out to examine the attitudes of native speakers of French about foreign accents, as well as the attitudes of American college-age students and American graduate student teaching assistants about attaining native-like pronunciation in French. The goal was to discover if it really is necessary to sound like a native speaker to interact in French with native French speakers. Aspiration to Native-Like Proficiency O'Brien (2004) remarked that foreign language learners face a paradox: Having a native-like accent is important to their success in a foreign language, but the likelihood of attaining a native-like accent is very small. For Marx (2002), "becoming a fully competent speaker of a foreign language, especially with regard to accent, is extremely difficult . . . The near disappearance of an L1 [first language] accent is perhaps unusual" (p. 276). Research on whether adult learners can achieve native-like proficiency in a second or foreign language has shown that some individuals are capable of performing in a second or foreign language at the level of native speakers. Some studies (Birdsong, 1992; Coppieters, 1987; Moyer, 1999; White & Genesee, 1996) have compared the performance of advanced L2 learners on tasks designed to test syntactic structures. …