This article examines difficulties in pronouncing French vowels among Moroccan primary school learners, analyzing how the articulatory and phonological features of Darija affect vowel production in French as a foreign language. The study adopts a comparative phonological approach to identify structural differences between the two vowel systems and explain the origins of the observed interference. Sixty fourth-grade learners in Moroccan public primary education participated in an action research study combining a diagnostic pretest of pronunciation errors with a posttest assessing the effectiveness of a phonetic correction intervention. The findings reveal that pronunciation errors reflect systemic difficulties attributable to differences between the vowel systems of Darija (a three-vowel system) and French (a sixteen-vowel system). The instructional intervention, combining articulatory, verbotonal, and comparative approaches, led to a significant reduction in errors, particularly for rounded and nasal vowels. The study offers practical pedagogical recommendations for integrating systematic corrective phonetics into French instruction at the primary school level.
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Bensaid et al. (2026) studied this question.
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