Listening Cherry 11 – Yes/no questions begin with ‘D’

Listening Cherries is a blog where I talk about listening issues - from classroom activities to academic research. Listening Cherry no. 11 is a rant about 'question intonation'.

 

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We believe crazy things about speech. We believe these things, because they are in our students’  textbooks, and we are taught them in our teacher-training. One of these crazy beliefs is that a sentence type has a particular intonational pattern. For example, that yes/no questions have rising intonation, and wh-questions have falling intonation, for example:

…  Wh-questions start high and then fall … Soars et al. (2009: 7)

These beliefs continue to exist despite our being told that they are erroneous. Here’s Wells 2006:

In general there is no simple predictable relationship between sentence type and tone choice. (p. 15, emphasis added)

And Cruttenden 2014:

Learners should note that, despite what is often stated in textbooks on English language teaching, both rises … and falls … occur frequently on yes/no interrogatives and wh-interrogatives. (p. 335, emphasis added)

But these experts cannot shift these crazy beliefs, which are part of the architecture of ELT. The beliefs have gained such staying power that they have become immovable fixtures. They have to be in any student textbook that’s going to get to market; they have to be in any teacher training publication on phonology.

On the one hand they are harmless – ‘usefully wrong’, but on the other hand they can be harmful and throw obstacles in the way of effective teaching of listening.

One way in which they are harmful, is that any deviation can count as ‘rule-breaking’ for which you can be castigated. I have been told by a teacher trainer  that he had heard his trainees use rising intonation on Wh-questions on their teaching practice in primary schools – and he told them off. Another way in which they are harmful is that they deafen us to what happens in reality. Because we ‘know’ the rules of question intonation, we discount the evidence of our ears.

But for me, one of the most annoying things about these beliefs, is that they are so transparently falsifiable. A moment’s reflection would be enough to provoke the reaction: ‘Hey wait a minute, let’s see if that is really the case.’ And after a few minutes of thought experiments (‘Let’s try it with falling intonation’) evidence would emerge against the belief. But teacher training in ELT inculcates trainees into the established beliefs and practices of the profession, regardless of these beliefs’ relationship to reality. We continue to hold them, because they are part of our history, because they come to us from authority figures. And even when the authority figures tell us ‘Actually, wait a minute, the rules are not true’ we don’t hear them.

It is as if we are told in our teacher-training that ‘Yes/no questions begin with the letter ‘D’.’ And we are given these selected examples as ‘proof’:

Do you like ice-cream? Did you see the football match?

How long would we hold to this belief? Very soon, we would come across examples of yes/no questions which went counter to this rule:

Are you happy with that? Is your brother married?

These two questions begin with the letters ‘A’ and ‘I’ respectively, and so they clearly falsify the ‘D’-rule, and so we would abandon it (I hope …)

But in the case of question intonation, we don’t. It’s as silly as believing that yes/no questions begin with the letter ‘D’.

Cruttenden, A. (2014). Gimson’s pronunciation of English. [8th Edition]. London: Routledge.

Soars, L., Soars, J., & Maris, A. (2009). New headway intermediate: Teachers’ book. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Wells, J. C. (2006). English intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.