Difficultés d’emploi des lettres muettes par les étudiants de deuxième année de français à University of Education, Winneba.

Abstract

In the written language, spelling includes many agreement and homophones difficulties caused by letters that are not pronounced. French orthography is generally considered as 'difficult' by those who use it, especially foreign or second language learners. This study aims to analyze the mistakes made by students of the University of Education, Winneba, regarding silent letters in French orthography in order to propose a solution to help students in their learning of the French orthography. Our corpus is derived from the written productions of thirty-five (35) second year students of the Department of French Education at the University of Education, Winneba obtained through a dictation test and a test of phonetic transcription. Data from this survey are analyzed with the typology of error analysis proposed by Catach et al. (2012). This includes errors with morphogrammique, logogrammique and non-functional dominant. The results showed that the lack of ‘biunivocité’ between the graphemes and phonemes and the presence of the morphological, logographic, etymological or historical letters explain this difficulty with the use of silent letters.

Key words: Spelling, silent letters, grapheme, phoneme, morphological, logographic, etymological, historical letters.