When the pre-training recording sessions were over, the trainings could start. Group A
received a training on English individual sounds, and Group B received a training on English
rhythm and prosody. The trainings took place in an empty room at the University of Lille III,
and they lasted a few hours each. Since all five subjects of each group could not be free at the
exact same time and day, the two trainings had to take place in two sessions each – three
subjects in one session, and the two subjects left in another session.
The two trainings were based on the phonology of RP English, that is, the variety that is
mostly used in school context in France. All the participants had mentioned in the
questionnaires that they did not think they spoke any particular variety of English. Training
A, with segmental focus, included: vowel quality, with an emphasis on the lax/tense
distinction and realization;
voiceless plosives; the realizations of the dental fricatives /?/-/ð/; dark
production of the velar nasal /?/. Training B, with prosodic focus, consisted of: (at the wordlevel)
lexical stress, the realization of word prominence; (at the sentence-level) the principal
rules of accentuation of content words vs. deaccentuation of grammatical words; stresstiming
realization and (natural) vocalic reduction; quickened tempo; nuclear accent
placement. Overall realization of the stress-timed rhythm of English was especially practised
during Training B. Both trainings consisted of numerous common examples outside the
stimuli and much oral practice. They were done in French, and no technical vocabulary, such
as “nucleus” or “allophone”, was used as the aim was not to increase the subjects’ theoretical
knowledge in English phonology, but rather to help them improve their pronunciation.