Prosody for teaching French as a foreign language

Abstract Prosody, with its core elements the melody and timing of speech, is one of the aspects learners often struggle with when learning foreign languages in its spoken form. The teaching of prosody is however still largely overlooked — even though prosodic knowledge would help to improve learners’ comprehensibility. The present contribution concentrates on prosody teaching of French as a foreign language in Germany. We present the results of semi-structured interviews conducted with five experienced teachers of different regions in Germany. Our aim is to explore the needs among the foreign-language teachers. The teachers reported a rather marginal treatment of prosody, focusing instead on lexis and morpho-syntax in their teaching practice. Concurrently, all of them considered the relevance of prosodic topics as medium to high. We discuss several reasons for this discrepancy including issues of university education as well as quality of textbooks. The teachers also expressed the need to receive input on how to apply prosodic content in the classroom. This includes (a) comprehensible and didactically reduced teaching materials, (b) criteria for grading prosodic skills, (c) authentic audio material, and (d) in-service training. Finally, we present several ideas on how to make linguistic findings on prosody accessible for the foreign-language classroom.