15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)

Barcelona, Spain
August 3-9, 2003


Enhancing Fluency in the Reading of a French Text: An Experimental Phonetics Approach

Eugenia Mbanefo

The Nigeria French Language Village, Nigeria

In the theoretical framework of fluency whose concept is defined, the article analyses the relationship between fluency and pause distribution from the perspective of obvious difficulties facing Nigerian learners of French as a foreign language. An experiment shows that enhanced fluency is a function of better pause management as highlighted by the results of acoustic analysis before and after treatment.
   While the first reading by all the subjects showed abundant use of pauses, with non-syntactic pauses (NSP) accounting for a greater percentage of the total speech time, confirming illegal pauses as being responsible for lack of fluency, the second reading of the text by the experimental group showed a significant reduction in the occurrence of NSP, thus confirming the efficacy of a well-articulated pedagogical approach in enhancing fluency through pause frequency reduction.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Mbanefo, Eugenia (2003): "Enhancing fluency in the reading of a French text: an experimental phonetics approach", In ICPhS-15, 2461-2464.