As is specified in Avery and Ehrlich (1992), many English words were borrowed from French
after the Norman Conquest. Still today, the two languages share many vocabulary items, at
least orthographically. As regards pronunciation, the difficulty encountered by French
speakers is noticeable, and it partly originates in too great an influence of spelling (Burgess &
Spencer, 2000). This idea is confirmed by Hodges’ (2006: 4) statement: “French EFL students
of novice proficiency often see words with the same spelling in their native language and
assume that the pronunciation, stresses and even meaning are the same”. Segmentals thus
have an obviously important role when it comes to EFL pronunciation teaching, all the more
as very few common features are to be found between the French and the English phonetic
realizations, even of the most used phonemes like /t/, /l/, and /e/ (Birdsong, 2003). Although
teachers emphasize the productions of vowels more than consonants – possibly because the
former constitute the nucleus of a syllable –, both have equally visible differences with the
French sounds, and the errors made by learners are as significant. Hodges (2006) goes even
further and affirms that the problem French speakers have with the pronunciation of English
sounds is such that many French-speaking English teachers never acquire some typically
English phonemes. Consequently, they transmit incorrect pronunciation to their students.
In this subsection, the only segmental errors by French EFL learners that are considered as
relevant are those that might lead to unintelligibility. After a descriptive account of learners’
difficulties and production errors at the level of consonants and vowels, the problem of
minimal pairs, i.e. where clashes occur the most because of segmental errors, is worth being
discussed, since it is one of the few consequences of the errors, if not the main one.