Although most French EFL learners do not realize it, they have a number of problems with
English rhythm and prosody (Mortreux, 2008), all the more as they often prefer to practise
vowel production, thus producing full vowels only and not realizing vowel reduction
naturally. Burgess and Spencer (2000) used questionnaires that they gave to EFL teachers and
found that stress, rhythm, intonation and vowel reduction were all mentioned as major areas
of difficulty experienced by learners. They remark that this is “all the more interesting as
many pronunciation materials have tended to focus primarily on segmental features” (idem:
197). If one reasons that misproducing rhythm, for example, is “like being out of beat in
music” (Lemmens, 2010: iii), it is easily understandable that suprasegmental errors are just as
important as segmental errors. The prosody of a language should be seen as its basic
structure. The major difficulty of acquisition lies in the fact that two different languages have
differences at the suprasegmental level, and English and French are no exceptions. French
learners automatically reproduce L1 prosodic features, and the resulting errors have a
devastating effect on intelligibility, just as segmental errors do.
In this subsection, the extent to which suprasegmental features constitute a source of
difficulty for French EFL learners is analyzed. The main suprasegmental components of the
English phonological system – namely intonation, stress, and rhythm – are looked at. Also,
the way they may become problematic to French learners, and therefore the more or less
important consequences they have on communication and foreign-accentedness even, are
studied.