Teaching French Final Consonants and Grammatical Gender of Inanimate Nouns

Abstract

Because most final consonants are mute in French but pronounced in English, Anglophones tend to pronounce them in French. The pronunciation of final consonants in French indicates the presence of a final e, which marks the (feminine) grammatical gender of animate nouns in French. Thus, errors in the pronunciation of final consonants are pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary mistakes which risk hindering comprehensibility. In this lesson, participants learn and apply morpho-syntactic and phonetic patterns. After listening and repeating 10 French nouns similar to English nouns ( bracelet, secret …) while looking at the written words, and their corresponding pictures, they are shown pictures of the same words without the written forms to retrieve the nouns, articles and pronunciation. For transfer, participants are given new words with the same phonetic and grammatical (gender) rule so they can apply the rules to novel words, thus demonstrating they have internalized the phonetic and the grammatical rules.