engleski

French pronunciation difficulties of Croatian- speaking students in relation to English as a foreign language

A highly complex foreign language learning process involves the acquisition of a whole set of interdependent language elements in order to achieve global communicative competence. French pronunciation, compared to Croatian, is characterized by frontal positioning of the articulatory basis (“front pronunciation”), by labialization resulting in different degrees of vowel aperture and vowel timbre variation, by accentuation principles resulting in specific rhythm and intonation patterns, etc. All aspects of foreign language pronunciation are language-specific, starting from rhythm and intonation units – structures which have a strong impact on pronunciation quality. Phonemes are realized in mutual correlations according to the combination system and prosodic models of the given language. The combination system implies the combinations of phonemes acceptable within the particular phonological system. The prosodic models derive from the overall rhythm and intonation models of use in the particular language. Therefore, the optimal realization of a new phoneme may be achieved only by mastering multiple pronunciation elements, including all sounds within the rhythm and intonation pattern of the utterance. This paper presents a study on the acquisition of optimal French language pronunciation by adult learners. Is their pronunciation of French affected only by their mother tongue, or is it also influenced by the foreign language that the learners have already mastered? The aim of this paper is to recognize and classify the pronunciation difficulties caused by other foreign language of the students of French language and literature at the Department of Romance languages of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. Recordings of the students’ phonetic realization of the chosen utterances will be analyzed in order to detect the features of the foreign accent which may be described as the result of another foreign language influence. It may be assumed that, along with the difficulties resulting from the differences between the Croatian and French phonological systems, some of their difficulties cannot be attributed to the influence of their mother tongue. The research aims at determining the existence of the influence of other foreign language on the students' pronunciation of French in the context of multilingualism.

French pronunciation, Croatian-speaking students, second language influence, multilingualism

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