French prosody of Italian speakers: characteristics and didactic inputs

Oral production in a second language (L2) is imprinted by native language phonetic system. Nevertheless the integration of the L2 prosodic features is often overlooked at didactic level. On the basis of the verbo tonal method that proposes an interactive phonetic correction of the errors when and where they are produced, this study aimed to identify the main prosodic errors in French L2 of the Italian speakers. Another objective was to verify the effect of intonation types (declarative, interrogative, exclamatory and imperative) on these prosodic errors. A further aim was to give some didactic inputs in order to concretely help teachers of French L2 to increase the oral skills of the Italian adult native speakers. Sixty Italian adult native speakers participated to the study and repeated verbatim 44 recorded sentences. The analysis of the repetition characteristics showed interesting effects on prosodic rhythm (i.e. central vowels added in the utterance and the transformation of the nasal vowels closed by the corresponding nasal consonants). Moreover it highlighted a strong effect of the intonation type on the presence of the error types. The observations let us consider activities mainly based on the French isosyllabic rhythm.