A l'écoute du français: la comprehension orale dans le cadre de l'intercomprehension des langues romanes: étude menée auprès d'etudiants italophones

This work is part of to those studies that analyse language inter-comprehension as a way to promote plurilinguism. Previous studies have focused on written comprehension. In contrast, this work analyses the possibility to develop oral intercomprehension by exploiting similarities across different languages having the same origin. In particular, the empirical part of this study focuses on Italian-speaking students and on their comprehension of French as a foreign language. Two experiments have been run. In the first one, students with no knowledge of French have been asked to recognise 200 French words. In the second experiment, almost beginners in French have been asked to listen and understand complex audio documents through a guided and/or free recall process. The study identifies and describes errors correlated with the specificity of the close foreign language in order to define the extension of transparency and the grade of opacity between the two languages. It also describes the comprehension strategies adopted by the students such as consciousness of transparency by applying "passage rules" from a French word into an Italian one, inference processes and so on. The main conclusions of the dissertation can be summarised as follows. Oral specific methods can be developed for improving the comprehension ability of a close foreign language, but they should take into account the written aspect of the language which is easier in a comprehension situation : in our experiments, we have systematically compared oral and written comprehension. Oral comprehension teaching methods should also be designed by taking into account a real progression of the input and a gradation of the activities according to the comprehension difficulties identified by the two experiments of this study. This would certainly distinguish oral comprehension teaching methods from those that already exist for written inter-comprehension, in which the input is not progressive but the student ability grows up progressively. The dissertation is divided into two volumes. In the first one (287 pages), the theoretical framework is proposed and the results of the experiments are discussed. The second volume (314 pages) contains several annexes and appendices with the outputs of the two experiments that have been performed, together with the linguistic analyses of the radio documents.