French Pronunciation Course
for English Speakers
by Dr. Bernard Rochet

This CD-ROM collection was made for me: I am a native-English speaker, I have done some French language and linguistic courses, and I am off to France this summer and need to brush up on my French. So, as I browsed through the three CDs of this pronunciation course, I became familiar once again with the difficulties an anglophone faces when attempting accent-reduction. And this program will definitely help me with my attempts.

The lessons are based on modern pedagogical theory:

• discourse-level phonological features, such as intonation patterns and rhythm;
• phrase- and word-level contextualized modifications, such as liaison and silent ‘e’; plenty of controlled practice through imitative practice.
• listening exercises for the development of auditory perception/discrimination;
• sound-to-spelling and spelling patterns as cues to stress and rhythm.

Each CD contains 5 lessons, making 15 in all. I recommend buying all three disks, as they make a fairly complete course. When I say complete, I mean that a student will first need a basic knowledge of linguistics to take advantage of the wealth of information available on the CDs. For example, when one of the hints for a student recording is, "articulate [French R] as a velar fricative; because it follows a dental consonant"…etc, an instructor might be a helpful resource here, and indeed the course offers an "Admin" program to register students and assign lessons.

The three disks are comprehensive in their coverage. Disk One includes English versus French rhythm, the high and mid-front vowels, intonation including emphatic stress, and the consonant R. The third CD concludes with French Canadian and southern French dialects compared to Parisian French. In between, there are all sorts of lessons to help me reduce my accent.

Most introductory and explanatory screens are simple text boxes, with some very simple animations of the articulators, but the exercises and quizzes which come soon after offer excellent 16-bit (CD-quality) sound and a record feature to compare my French to the natives. No wave-forms or voice-recognition here: Salix Corporation claims they are not adequate enough to help students (and instructors) analyze their voices; providing valuable feedback to make these features worthwhile is a daunting task, given the voice-recognition abilities of today’s PCs… perhaps in the next generation of desktop computing. And after all, the basis for this type of exercise is ear-training, not a 'visual-representation' analysis.

System Requirements:
IBM compatible PC, Windows 3.1, 95, 98 or NT (or Macintosh running SoftWindows 5.0), Color monitor, 8MB RAM, Sound card, Microphone, CD-ROM drive, 10MB of free Hard Drive space

Test Machine:
Pentium 133 with 16MB RAM

Version Reviewed:
1.0

Price Info:
3-CD set: $79.95 USD

Availability:
Commercial software available from the publisher.

Quick Summary:

Hits:

• solid theory and sound pedagogy
• clear CD-Quality sound
• easy-to-use record feature
• administration feature for instructors and laboratories

Misses:

• Windows only (works on Windows-emulation software for Macintosh: Virtual PC 2.0 or later, or SoftWindows 5.0)
• missing that extra communicative-contextualized interactivity to fill up the disks

Screen Capture:
(Click for larger image)

Package Cover