If the most common goal in learning a foreign language is to be able to hold a conversation, then understanding how this skill is built can be very profitable!
This article looks at oral language acquisition in native and foreign languages, the oral-written relationship, the particularities of the French language, and puts forward a number of teaching suggestions.
In terms of evolution
In homo sapiens, the appearance of spoken language far precedes the invention of writing, a very recent cultural phenomenon in our history. These two stages follow in the same way in the language development of every human being.
In fact, it takes a few years for the little man to acquire the basics of oral communication. It’s only after that, when they go to school, that they complete and perfect this acquisition by learning to read and write.
Chronologically, then, language is oral before it is written, and according to the famous linguist Saussure (1), there is a subordinate relationship between the two: “Language and writing are two distinct systems of signs; the sole raison d’être of the latter is to represent the former“. We transcribe the sounds of the former using letters, which in turn make up the words that form sentences.
Although the conditions and mechanisms of acquisition differ in the learning of a foreign language, it is advisable to respect this natural order, especially in French. What’s more, unlike Italian or Turkish, the correspondence between the pronunciation of sounds and their transcription on paper is not always self-evident. They can be written in a variety of ways, with some letters not being readable and rules even applying between words.
To avoid being misled by all the pitfalls lurking around the corner, it ‘s best to get to grips with the sound forms beforehand.
Building an "audio database"
The language classroom is like an artificial immersion in a new world of sound. The learner, especially the beginner, will need to focus all his or her attention on this string of unfamiliar sounds if he or she is to extract meaning.
By recognizing and then relaying spoken messages, it gradually builds up a kind of mental repertoire of meaningful speech forms. It is this database that enables interaction with interlocutors during conversations.
When it comes to reading, the correspondence between these focal forms and the written forms of the language is not always obvious , especially when the language you’re studying isn’t “transparent”. But if you’ve exchanged enough orally, the memory of the “ It goes like thisThe “Ça se dit comme ça” (“It’s how it’s said”) program helps you avoid the pitfalls of the written word, and increases the chances of successful reading.
How to develop your ear?
What could be more fleeting and unstable than sounds? They’re hard to hear, constantly changing according to the intonation of the speaker, and systematically disappearing as quickly as they appeared.
If the temptation to grab your pen and fix them on paper or refer to the subtitles of a film is justifiable, it’s imperative to resist it. Indeed, it’s only by clinging to the few holds they offer our ears that we develop the acuity essential to being able to understand them in this evanescent form.
In short, oral proficiency remains a crucial prerequisite for a confident approach to reading and writing, especially for beginners.
The written word as an indicator of the spoken word
Unless we were exposed to several idioms in early childhood, the dominant influence of our first language naturally leads us to make mistakes in foreign languages. This universal phenomenon manifests itself when, in all innocence, we copy expressions word for word, use terms that have no correspondence or try to reproduce sounds absent from our native linguistic repertoire.
When we write, our inner speech is primarily built up from spoken language formulations, before being projected onto paper. Some research (2) suggests that 80% of mistakes in writing are simply the result of a poorly assimilated oral language: sounds that are poorly transcribed because they were misheard, incorrect word orderin the sentence, inappropriate lexical choices – all this often because of our mother tongue.
That’s why it’s possible to judge the quality of a speaker’s oral expression by what he or she writes, all the more so if we know the characteristics of his or her dominant language.
The need to speak as much as possible
When learning a foreign language in a country where it is not spoken, opportunities for practice outside the classroom are rare, if not non-existent. And yet, it’s only through regular, sustained use that you can acquire the automatisms you need to produce sentences with ease, without having to think about it consciously.
Mastering the language, with all its subtleties and implicit meanings, offers the prospect of limitless progress, proportional to the time you devote to it. On this path, the supervision of an expert teacher proves more judicious than ever, as much to rectify errors and approximations as to bring you up to speed on the terms that are really used, as opposed to those that only exist in books.
Practising speaking is a potential guarantee of progress, but also of maintaining our ability to exchange, because an unused language deteriorates, even when it’s our mother tongue.
1-Chapter VI (Cours de linguistique générale – Saussure)
2-GERMAIN Claude, NETTEN Joan, “La précision et l’aisance en FLE/FL2 – définitions, types et implications pédagogiques”, ed. M.L.M.S., 2004.
