This study focuses on Swedish 6th-9th graders’ (ages 12-16) pronunciation of the French voiced fricatives /z/ and /ʒ/. These phonemes are non-existent in the Swedish phonemic inventory, although it includes the voiceless counterparts /s/ and /ʂ/. The mastering of the two voiceless–voiced French phonemic contrasts /s-z/ and /ʃ-ʒ/ has been singled out as a major difficulty for L1 Swedish, L2 English speakers of L3 French. The few earlier studies covering this topic have involved university students (Hammarström, 1954; Stridfeldt, 2016) and high school students (Stöök, 1967). Research on middle and junior high school learners seems to be lacking. This presentation reports on a pilot study carried out within a larger project that aims to investigate the extent to which Swedish 6th-9th graders realize the French phonemes /z, ʒ/ in a target-like manner. The project also seeks to explore students' rates of target-likeness in relation to their levels of awareness of the contrasts /s-z, ʃ-ʒ/ and the pronunciation instruction they perceive to have received in school. The piloted instrument consists of four speaking tasks, an AX discrimination task and an interview about students' perceived pronunciation instruction. The speaking tasks (repetition of words, reading of a text, conversation, reading of words) have been adapted from the IPFC protocol (Detey & Kawaguchi, 2008; Racine et al., 2012). The recordings of students will be rated by native French speakers. A first trial, with a 6th, 7th and 9th grader, resulted in minor modifications to the instrument, which will be evaluated in a subsequent trial. Tentative results from this severely restricted sample suggests that the 6th grader out-performs their older peers on the repetition task but has the lowest discrimination abilities. This presentation details the methodological refinements of the instrument as well as results from the completed pilot study.