Abstract:

This study attempts to record in a diachronic way the results of the perception and production of French oral vowels as pronounced by Jordanian female students. The study reasserts that phonetic training has a positive effect on students' level of achievement and performance. Students' ability to recognize sounds is a precondition of their ability
to reproduce and mimic these sounds. The role of the mother tongue cannot be underestimated in having an effect on student's level of performance. This is corroborated by acoustic measurements and phonetic tests. For example, sounds that have no equivalents, i.e. are alien to Arabic, were easily discriminated. Nonetheless, students encountered
problems recognizing and producing "rounded" oral vowels. They could not tell the difference between the following pairs [u]-[o], [y]-[ø], and [oe]-[ɔ]. Nor could they recognize, let alone produce, the vowels like [e-ɛ], that differ mainly in the degree of mouth opening. The study recommends that students be given more training courses in
articulatory and perceptive phonetics, especially in their early years of study, to enable them to better recognize and eventually produce French sounds in a native-like manner.