Sometimes titles pop into your head, and they are of such a nature that they make writing very easy. One such title for me was ‘Faith, Hope and Charity - the Three Vices of Listening Comprehension.’ (I have a Catholic background). As the title had arrived before the ideas, I had some serious work to do. But it was easy - there is just so much wrong with the teaching of listening that it could have gone in a number of different directions.

I put words beginning with ‘Mis-‘ in front of each of the vices - thus getting ‘Misplaced Faith’, ‘Misguided Hope’ and ‘Misdirected Charity’. I argued that the teaching of listening places too much faith in research into first language research, too much hope in the fact that students will be able to catch stresses, and we show too much charity to learners giving them ‘what they can manage’ rather than ‘what they need to learn to cope with’.

The article was written as a teaser to entice people to come to a conference at which I was talking - and a ‘more mature’ and ‘considered’ version later appeared as ‘Grasping the nettle - the Importance of Perception Work in Listening Comprehension’ which is available on the web here. It’s become a reasonably commonly read piece on teacher-training courses, and one day someone, on being introduced to me exclaimed ‘Oh, so you are Grasping-the-nettle-Cauldwell!’

I should have kept the original title - imagine the thrill of being saluted ‘Oh you are Three-Vices-Cauldwell!’

Image from R & N Horological here.

Image from here.

I believe that 23rd May (next Monday!) is the due date for the publication of the new EPUB 3.0 standard for electronic publications (books read on mobile devices). I don’t speak to many people ‘in the know’ about it, but two that I do are both associated with Firsty Group who seem to do epubs under the current format really well. I say really well, because they produced a sample of a Chapter of Phonology for Listening which looks really smart, with nicely stable soundfiles.

They are a little bit sceptical about whether or not the target date will be met - it’s just that there are so many people and organisations (members of the International Digital Publishing Forum) that have to agree on things. Particularly the manufacturers of Electronic readers (Kindles, iPads, the sony e-reader, etc.) who are all keen to ensure that the standard will not put their readers at a market disadvantage. So lots of people have to agree … but this statement here (dated early May) seems to imply it is just a matter of dotting ‘i’s and crossing ‘t’s.

Naive me also believed that once the standard is published, everything is fine and dandy: all people have to do is obey it to the letter, and everything will work on everything else. But apparently not. There will be an evolutionary process of working out the really fine detail which will take some while to work through …

Stress timing is a term with only one legitimate use: as a shorthand term for pedagogic exercises which demonstrate the relationship between prominent and non-prominent syllables (stressed and unstressed syllables if you prefer) in isolated clauses.

The term, even in this use, is misleading. It is a relic from a much discredited (but surviving, and often repeated) theory about the the rhythms of different languages. The theory is an attractive one: lovely, neat, appealing, and in accord with intuition. But the experimental evidence against its viability exists in huge dollops - it is easy to refute, it has been refuted, it should be dead in the water. It should only be mentioned in historical surveys of the crazy things we used to believe about language.

But it is wheeled out and repeated far too often, and it remains alive largely because of the usefulness of the term as a pedagogic shorthand, and the comparative ‘difficulty’ of alternative explanations of the theory. It also seems to have power to capture the imagination, and suppress reasoning.

Academic explanations of the theory often begin with a disclaimer ‘Oh it’s been proven to be untrue, and the situation is really more complex than believed by the original proponents of the theory, but nevertheless …’ and then a description of the theory is again presented.

It’s as if the standard explanation for the delivery of presents over Christmas began with a cursory acknowledgement of the role of the post-office, private delivery companies, Amazon, and digital downloads - but then giving far more prominence to the story of Santa Claus.

He makes a list, checks it twice, gets the elves to package the presents in Lapland and then loads the sleigh, and has Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer and his team pull the sleigh around the globe, and stops off at every house on Christmas Eve to slide down the chimney to put the presents under the Christmas tree.

For goodness sake! There ain’t no Santa Claus, and there ain’t no stress-timing.

Years ago I wrote something about this here.