This article addresses the problem why authentic pronunciation in a foreign language, contrary to other aptitudes in that same language, is so difficult, if not altogether impossible, to achieve. The problem is addressed from different theoretical perspectives: psycholinguistics, physiology and psychology. The approach by Guiora seems so far the most complete and the most promising. The problem of the necessity or the desirability of authentic pronunciation from a teaching point of view is not addressed. The article finishes on the question whether in the global village in which we live, the role of authentic pronunciation will not necessarily change in nature.

Recently we have been witnessing a didactic evolution in language teaching in Denmark which is quite manifest in the teaching of French. This evolution is the result of adoption of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages and a slow step towards a more communicative teaching with clearer goals ensuring a progression and a more pronounced awareness of this progression in acquisition. This evolution is based on research in which begins to influence more directly the national teaching programmes. The present article analyses the programmes and the initiatives in primary and secondary school teaching and in teacher education, and treats some problems which remain to be solved (choices of grammatical description and target language, integration of culture in language teaching).

This paper shows how research on variation in spoken French and studies on languages in contact in West Africa have changed attitudes towards the French language and its teaching. There has been an ever increasing amount of research interest in acquisition of French in Africa over the last years and these studies might also have changed attitudes and perceptions towards learning French. The current research is focused on the analysis of classroom interactions. Both the constitution of a large corpus on acquisition and learning of French and the prospects for a revival or change in teaching methods and training are related here.

Is there a correlation between the grammatical developmental level and the lexical developmental level in the written production of learners of French as a foreign language ? We have applied a number of quantitative lexical and grammatical measures to 40 texts in French written by two groups of Swedish adults with different proficiency levels. All analyses were carried out using different software (among them a system wear developed by ourselves) in an attempt to demonstrate the possibilities of current automatic analyses. The results show that, even if several measures discriminate between the two independently established groups, there is no simple correlation of correlation between them. The measure of lexical sophistication was the only one showing a significant correlation with the grammatical measure used.