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.

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'.

Image from here.

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.