Chinese learners of French with English as L2 in the learning of vowel system

Chinese learners often face great pronunciation difficulties when learning French. These difficulties are not only caused by L1 Chinese, but also strongly linked to L2 English, after years of learning from primary school to high school. Believing that English is closer to French, Chinese learners often look for similar pronunciations in English while some French sounds exist phonetically in Chinese. In this paper we focus on their acquisition of French vowels and try to identify the influences of L1 and L2 respectively, based on a corpus with homogeneous learner profiles in uncontrolled speech.