« Le mystère de la voyelle E » ou quelques remarques sur les contrastes acoustiques [e] – [ɛ] dans le contexte de l’enseignement/apprentissage du FLE

The object of our study is the vowel E pronounced in French as a closed [e] or an open [ɛ], an opposition that teachers (often non-native speakers) are regularly confronted with when teaching French as a Foreign Language. From a practical point of view, the exercises contained in phonetics textbooks are aimed at learning to discriminate and produce these acoustic contrasts. Theoretically, on the other hand, the explanations focus mainly on the phonic-graphic relationship to distinguish [e] from [ɛ], are sometimes presented in a fragmentary way, or lack of a wider context. For a better understanding of the facts, a question arises: what basic mechanisms govern the pronunciation of [e] and [ɛ] in spoken French (“standard” or “standardized”, as heard in recordings in FFL textbooks)? Our aim is to shed light on certain aspects of their content, in particular, by providing an authentic illustration of how distributional and etymological constraints work. The distributional constraint is an undeniable priority in teaching the phonetic system to non-French speakers.