The purpose of this study was to describe the pronunication of American college students learning French. To gather the data a set of 21 sounds, all theoretically in contrast with English sounds, was chosen. These were elicited in a series of sessions during the subjects' first semester of French. The subjects recorded their pronunciation on tapes, which were evaluated for accuracy. The results obtained were varied and complex. Certain sounds elicited accurate reproduction with few deviations; others produced very inaccurate imitations with few deviations. On the other hand, several sounds evoked responses of varying accuracy and many different deviations. The sounds produced were very often not those predicted by contrastive analysis of the American English and French sound systems. An extensive discussion of contrastive analysis and error analysis, with emphasis on the work of other researchers, is included. (Author/JB)