Listening Cherry 12 – Yes/no questions – after the rant

A blog about teaching listening in ELT. Number 12 reflects on my rant about 'question intonation'.

Image from here.

Listening Cherry 11 was a rant about what ELT believes about Yes/no questions. The problem with a rant is that you close your mind to other factors  which – when you are not ranting – you would carefully consider. And my rant in the last post is no exception. A quick reminder: I argued that continuing to believe in the concept of ‘question intonation’ is equivalent to believing that Yes/no questions begin with the letter ‘d’.

The major factor overlooked in the rant was that looking out for something (such as whether or not words begin with the letter ‘d’) is much more likely to result in findings which most people agree with, than listening out for something (such as falling tone or rising tone) where there is no visible trace that people can point to. Finding spellings in writing is easy because writing remains on the page to be inspected, whereas finding falls and rises in the sound substance of speech is made difficult by the fact that speech happens and then disappears.

There is also the issue of training. We are all trained, in nursery or primary school to recognise the letter ‘d’, and 99% of the time we can gather around a piece of writing and agree whether a given word begins with ‘d’. But training in hearing falls and rises occurs (if at all) when we are adult students of phonology or phonetics. Added to this is the fact that people trained in different descriptions of the systems of intonation will hear different phenomena at any given moment – and even people with training in the same description (cf. Cauldwell, 1997) will have different interpretations of the same acoustic phenomenon. Furthermore when you get machine analyses of intonation – fundamental frequency traces – they do not provide inconvertible proof that this or that tone has occurred in a particular location.

So where does that leave us? We are in a situation where  the ELT profession is effectively deaf to what ‘really happens’ in the sound substance of everyday speech. And we can remain in this deafness, and we can continue to hold to our false beliefs, and we can do so with little fear that these false beliefs will be overturned.

Cauldwell, R.T. (1997) . The Incompatibility of transcriptions: Implications for speech in computer corpora. [Departmental Paper] EISU The University of Birmingham. Available here.