The goal of this study is to discover the phonetic difficulties encountered in the acquisition of French as a second language by English-speaking children. The children are studying French in a total immersion situation without benefit of structural exercises or special French language laboratory classes. Of particular interest here is the extent to which the difficulties of English-speaking children are due to characteristics proper to French, to interference from English, or to the conditions under which they were learning French. To this end, ten subjects, 12 years of age, made three recordings each. The recorded data covered the following areas: (1) a three-minute conversation in which the subject spoke about film he or she had seen the previous day; (2) repetition of model sentences chosen for their phonetic difficulties; and (3) reading and writing of these same sentences by each student. Isolation and classification of the errors was done so that their nature, frequency, and level could be analyzed. From this analysis, the six phenomena studied here were isolated: (1) opening of high voewls; (2) devoicing of oral consonants; (3) the affrication of unvoiced occlusives; (4) variation of tone and retarding of nasalization; (5) liaison and elision; and (6) accentuation. (Author/AMH)