ON THE PHONETIC ASPECT OF TEACHING FRENCH

The article discusses the place of phonetics in teaching French. The importance of a theoretically based approach to the training of French sounds and proso-dy - the sequence of vowels under study to facilitate the consolidation of articulatory skills, the us-age of “base” sounds for teaching open and closed vowel series, the inclusion of the similarities and differences between the articulation of the target and native languages - is noted. The inventory of the articulatory features of the French sounds which ensure the articulate speech in French on dif-ferent levels of language proficiency is proposed. The determining role of prosody in building up pronunciation skills is underlined and the prosodic features required for sound flow organisation into entities reflecting semantic connections between words and the communicative intention of the speaker are determined: the similar length and the even tone of unstressed vowels, a different de-gree of stressed vowels prominence in accordance with the syntactical hierarchy, the rhematic tone localisation depending on the meaning of the utterance, alternation of rising and falling contours in complex utterances, the usage of rising and falling contour variants to express modal and emotional meanings. The main conclusion is that the formation of pronunciation skills in students is an achiev-able target within a limited time space assigned to the pronunciation course. Specialised phonetic training of teachers is the basic condition for success.