La perception de certains accents français de la part des enseignants et des futurs enseignants italiens du FLE (français langue étrangère): compréhension et attitudes

This study will investigate the reactions of Italian prospective and practicing teachers of French as Foreign Language (FFL) towards selected French accents. In particular it will focus on comprehensibility, recognition and acceptance of varieties of spoken French, in order to assess if those judgements are influenced by socio-cultural factors.
A hundred fifty university students, prospective teachers of French, with different level of competence of FSL (B1, B2, and C1 of CEFR), and thirty practicing teachers will listen to audio recordings of the same passage - a dialogue - read by male and female native speakers from each of the following accent groups: Parisian French, Belgian French, Swiss French, Italy Aostan French, Canadian French, Tunisian French, and Senegalese French. Listeners will be asked to:
- specify how long and where they have studied French language;
- indicate francophone countries where they have been and how long;
- mark their learning motivation: instrumental or internal;
- assess the comprehensibility of the utterance, i. e. estimate the difficulty in understanding the utterance, on a three-point scale (low, medium, high);
- identify the origin of each French speaker choosing among a list of possibilities consisting of all the French varieties actually considered for the present study and one distractor, i.e. Martinique French;
- express their attitude towards the different accents (positive or negative).
Results of perceptual tests will be experimentally verified through spectrographic analysis, in order to verify which acoustic features have relevance on listeners’ judgments about comprehensibility and accent identification. On the suprasegmental level, prosodic cues will be calculated (Articulatory Rate, Speech Rate, Pitch Range, Frequency of silences, percentage of Silence). On the segmental level, the spectrographic analysis will point out the different articulatory gestures employed in the production of consonants and vowels.
Finally, data concerning listeners’ attitudes will be analyzed in connection to accent identification results so to determine if there are socio-cultural factors, related to preferences of French accents, which influence the selection of a pronunciation model for the FFL classroom.