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This article examines the difficulties in pronouncing French vowels among Moroccan primary school learners, analyzing how the articulatory and phonological specificities of Darija affect vowel production in French as a foreign language. The study adopts a comparative phonological approach to identify structural divergences between the two vocalic systems and explain the origin of the observed interferences. Sixty fourth-grade learners from Moroccan public elementary schools participated in an action research combining a pretest diagnosing pronunciation errors and a posttest evaluating the effectiveness of a phonetic correction intervention. Results reveal that pronunciation errors reflect systemic difficulties primarily attributable to vocalic differences between Darija (a three-vowel system) and French (a sixteen-vowel system). The didactic intervention, combining articulatory, verbo-tonal, and comparative approaches, led to a significant reduction in errors, particularly for rounded and nasal vowels. The study proposes concrete didactic perspectives for integrating systematic corrective phonetics into French teaching at the primary level.
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Bensaid et al. (2026) studied this question.
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