This study focuses on the use of languages known to learners by teachers in Taiwan in teaching French pronunciation. Taiwanese learners of French generally all speak Taiwan Mandarin Chinese (guoyu) and learn English as their first foreign lan- guage. These two languages turn out to be the main languages that influence their learning of French (Landron et al., 2018). In order to better understand the practic- es of teachers in Taiwan, we distributed an online questionnaire between June and September 2020 in the distribution channels of the association of French teachers in Taiwan (APFT) and we asked the questions in particular: “In class, do you refer to the languages known to the learners for the pronunciation of French? and why? And if so, which languages?” The use of the languages known to the learners can be envisaged in two ways: The first use of the languages known to the learners is as a mediating language, the language that the teacher uses to give the course. The sec- ond possible use is to explicitly refer to these languages to compare them to French and highlight the similarities and differences between these languages. The choices are structured globally on the priorities put forward by the teachers or the institu- tions with regard to, on the one hand, facilitating the explanations and, on the other, getting the learners accustomed to the target language. In this article, we review the 28 responses we received to these questions. We will thus see that teachers are generally aware of the difficulties linked to the use or not of the L1 as a mediating language and that if some see in the L1 the possibility of encouraging the learning of French pronunciation with positive transfers, few explicitly consider comparing languages to avoid negative transfers.
