It is commonly admitted today that speech perception is more performing in an audiovisual context than in a visual one (Benoît, Mohamadi and Kandel, 1994, Schwartz, Berthommier and Savariaux, 2004). Visual information in this situation often consists of the speaker’s articulatory and facial gestures provided by the face-to-face interaction. However, when learning a foreign language, another type of visual help is generally available to identify oral forms: their written forms. And yet, in the field of didactics of foreign languages, the issue of the oral-written transition is far from being consensual and some didacticians favour training the pronunciation skills of the learner at the beginning of the learning process, before he is confronted to the written code (Lauret, 2007). Our hypothesis is that the facilitating effect of written forms should not be neglected, even at the beginning of a foreign language learning process. Our research is based on the case of Hindi speakers. Taking into consideration the specificities of this population, we think that written information can, in some cases, facilitate the oral reception of French sounds in the beginning of the learning process, which would be a preliminary condition to their production (Renard, 1979). We have conceived a series of test, forcing the Hindi speaking learners to refocus their attention on the nasal vowels [ɑ̃] and [ɔ̃]’s written form from the beginning of the learning process, using different forms of visual written focuses (Fort, Spinelli, Savariaux and Kandel, 2010). Our didactic proposal relies on the following process: perception – (written form transcription) – production, even though the present study is centred on the evaluation of speech perception.
