La Prononciation française pour de vrai (review)

Teaching French pronunciation to relative beginners is difficult because of the need to introduce alongside this information the relevant symbols of the IPA. These seem necessary because they represent speech sounds in a wholly transparent way, at least at a broad level, and all dictionaries now have IPA transcriptions; but they introduce further bewilderment when students are trying to master unfamiliar sounds. If students have an imperfect pronunciation, they will in any event have difficulty in decoding the sounds shown by the phonetic symbols, let alone by the conventional spelling of French, which is not very transparent. This is what computer specialists call a bootstrapping problem. The way to break the circle is to provide students with a model of accurate pronunciation, and the teacher is the most obvious source, but contact between student and tutor will in most cases be limited. Hence Penny Sewell's course offers very valuable support to any introductory course on French pronunciation. Her accent is impeccable, and the course covers everything needed at the basic level, and indeed beyond: stress, rhythm, intonation, syllables, differences between English and French, individual sounds, liaison, mute-e. A short booklet has transcription and comprehension exercises. The format mostly has Sewell talking into the camera, in effect delivering lectures for nearly six hours over three DVDs, and if this risks monotony, the delivery is lively and is punctuated by visuals and repetition exercises where the student is invited to fill a gap. It is in any case hard to see what other method could have been adopted, and one very valuable advantage of the visual dimension is the chance it gives the student to see the lip configurations necessary for the accurate production of vowels. The course is advertised as suitable for post-GCSE level; it is wholly in French, and of an advanced nature, so that it is possible to wonder what even post-A-level students will make of it. That said, quasi-technical terms can hardly be avoided in a course of this kind, and obviously the DVD format makes repeated listening very easy. A more detailed table of contents using the outmoded dead-tree method would have been helpful, since the teacher wielding the course, rather than just pointing the student in its general direction, will no doubt want to flag up the bits that are most relevant. On the whole, though, this is a very useful resource.