Abstract The present research investigates the efficacy of explicit phonetics and pronunciation instruction on learners of L2 French, by comparing the progress made by students enrolled in a phonetics course at a university with a control group of other advanced L2 French students who are not enrolled in phonetics. This study investigates the extent to which these findings apply to learners of French. Results indicate a positive effect of explicit instruction; a series of two-tailed t-tests showed no significant difference between groups on the pretest, but a significant difference between groups both on the posttest score and rate of improvement; a repeated-measures ANOVA showed an effect for time as a within-groups factor and an interaction of time × group. Both pretest and posttest measured the percent of syllables correctly pronounced in the respective recordings.