Casual French comprehension when French is not your native language

What is it about?

As a French language teacher, I often hear my students complain that they can understand me in the class but not French people in France. That is because the French that French people speak in casual conversations is not as neatly enunciated as the French I speak in class. When I speak to my friends, I might omit some sounds to speak faster. For example, to say 'the menu', I will say 'le m'nu' with an 'e' less than how students learn the word in French class (le menu). For some reason, even people with a good level of French struggle to understand these short forms. We wanted to know whether teaching French words directly in their short form would solve this comprehension problem. Using pictures and recordings, we taught 24 French words to three groups of Dutch students. One group only heard words in their short forms (le m'nu), one group only heard words in their full forms (le menu), and one group heard each word in both forms. When testing how well the three groups understood the short and the full form, we found that the group that learnt the short forms could understand the short forms just as well as the the group that learnt the full forms could understand the full forms. Even the group who heard both the short and the full forms had no more problems with the short than the full forms. These results really shows that the problem with short forms is that students simply do not get to hear them enough in class.

Featured Image

Photo by Scott Warman on Unsplash

Photo by Scott Warman on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Our findings are important because a lot of students after many years of language classes still cannot understand native speakers while our results show that there seems to be a 'simple solution' to this discouraging problem.

Perspectives