Enseignement de l’intonation en FLE aujourd’hui

Abstract

Since the 1980s, the teaching of intonation has practically disappeared from FLE textbooks (Billières, 2008). The causes may be found from the following observations:1. Since Delattre (1966), which remains the most quoted reference, a certain confusion remains about the modality (declarative, interrogative, implicative, etc.) and the prosodic structure of the sentence.2. For more than 30 years, the autosegmental-metrical phonological theory has become the dominant model to the point of making other approaches to the FLE audience inaudible.3. The use of tonal targets in the ToBI notation almost exclusively used in intonational descriptions of French is very unintuitive and discourages a good number of teachers and learners.4. In the autosegmental-metric descriptions of English, we often observe an amalgam of phonetic and phonological aspects, due to the holistic character the sentence.It is understandable that all these aspects can dislodge FLE teachers interested in sentence intonation and to go beyond the pronunciation of syllables or grammar and lexicon. By contrast, this paper presents an alternate approach, based on the latest discoveries of neurolinguistics.

Keywords

• french as foreign language
• intonation
• Delattre
• phrasing
• prosodic structure
• didactics