Graham Davies

Reading from the computer screen is around 25% slower than reading from the printed page and, ideally, you should write in a different way for the computer screen than for a printed publication. Web guru Jakob Nielsen writes:

"Reading from computer screens is about 25% slower than reading from paper. Even users who don't know this human factors research usually say that they feel unpleasant when reading online text."

Be Succinct! Writing for the Web, Alertbox for March 15, 1997: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9703b.html

Juan Carlos writes:

The troubles start when most of the people at the meeting are English native speakers. I had this feeling in some of our EHELP reunions, our British colleagues begin talking away... and I get lost for a longer or shorter while.

This is quite a common problem. English native speakers tend to forget that they are addressing non-native speakers and not only talk at high speed but also use lots of idiomatic expressions and references to British culture that make no sense to non-native speakers. It is a phenomenon that I have observed at numerous meetings, seminars and conferences. Many of us need training in addressing non-native speakers of our language.

Regarding translation: It is agreed practice among professional translators that they should normally translate only into their mother tongue. However, this rule is often broken due to the shortage of translators for some language pairs, and many translators have to translate in both directions - often with disastrous results. The EC is apparently desperate for Maltese speakers, having some 80,000 pages to translate and only 5 applicants for the 120 jobs on offer.

See the Web pages of the Directorate General for Translation of the European Commission (DGT): http://europa.eu.int/comm/dgs/translation/index_en.htm

Anders, I think you are doing pretty well. Don't be so modest!

Regarding spoken language:

I have been in pubs in Glasgow and in Alnwick (Northumberland), where I have struggled in vain to understand the local lingo. My wife Sally (from Belfast) manages slightly better than I do at understanding both these regional dialects. Her own local dialect can be quite impenetrable - but she normally speaks a mellowed version of it. On the other hand she still comes out with phrases that I have never heard before, such as "he got a quare gunk".

Scots, by the way, is officially classified as a different language from English. See the entry under "Scots" at:

http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/saoghal/mion-chanain/en

I have spent many holidays in the Austrian Tyrol. As a fluent speaker of German I am still embarrassed by my inability to understand more than one word in ten when the locals use their own dialect of German.

Dalibor asks:

1. My question in this debate is: What is an acceptable knowledge of foreign language?

2. To understand it when listening to it?

3. To be able to order food at the restaurants or buy a ticket at a bus station?

4. To be able to make a conversation in a casual way?

5. To be able to enjoy books and magazines written in the particular foreign language? And debate the content with the natives?

Not an easy set of questions to answer. It hinges on the term “acceptable” and for what purpose one wishes to learn a new language. I had to learn Hungarian in the 1990s – Hungarian is just as mysterious as Finnish. I was managing a project in Hungary and needed basic “survival skills”: e.g. ordering food in a restaurant, buying bus and train tickets, saying who I was, etc. But most of the time I used English and German – because the project involved retraining teachers of Russian to enable them to teach English or German. My knowledge of Hungarian became “acceptable” for what I needed, but I cannot sustain a conversation in Hungarian for more than a couple of minutes, and I am only able to understand the gist of articles written in newspapers and books – i.e. recognise what they are about.

The Council of Europe has drawn up a set of six levels, which have become an international yardstick for measuring competence in the four skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking: the Common European Framework (CEF). Level B1 (so-called “Threshold Level”) might come close to what is regarded as “acceptable”, i.e. the threshold of communicative competence, at which the learner begins to become reasonably confident in handling the language. A learner is expected to achieve this level after around 350–400 learning hours. One of the ways in which a learner’s competence is measured is to what extent he/she can answer positively to a set of “I can” statements. For further information and lists of “I can” statements see the Common European Framework document:

Council of Europe (2001) Common European Framework of reference: learning, teaching, assessment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN: Hardback 0521803136, Paperback: 0521005310.

See the following website for further information on the Common European Framework (CEF):

http://www.coe.int/T/E/Cultural_Co-operati...Language_Policy

The complete text of the Common European Framework (CEF) document can be downloaded from: http://culture2.coe.int/portfolio/document..._framework.html

Check your own level using the diagnostic tests developed under the DIALANG project. The tests are geared to the Common European Framework: http://www.dialang.org

I’ve just been lurking in this discussion so far. Here’s my two pennyworth.

I began teaching in London comprehensives in the mid-60s. It was a culture shock of immense proportions for me. My previous experience of secondary education was limited to my own: a highly selective boys’ grammar school at which most of the boys were expected to go on to university.

Behaviour in London comprehensives was appalling by comparison with my own experience at school. Children answered back at teachers, swore like troopers and regularly played truant. There were one or two appalling cases of disgusting behaviour, e.g. one boy cut off the feet of a guinea pig kept as a school pet, and another poured acid into the fish tank. A boy of 14 in one of the schools in which I was taught was convicted of raping a 13-year old.

I moved to rural Devon in the late-60s, having got a job in a grammar school as Head of German. My experience there was more like my own experience at the grammar school that I attended. It was a pleasure to teach the children, who were mostly polite and well behaved. I moved into higher education in the 1970s, taking early retirement in 1993. Bad behaviour was never a major problem for me in higher education.

Having begun by presenting the view that bad behaviour is not a new phenomenon, I am nevertheless of the opinion that behaviour among young people is generally deteriorating and becoming more widespread. I live on a middle-class estate in Berkshire. In the 1970s, when I moved into the area, I cannot recall any serious incidents of anti-social behaviour in the area where I live. Now they are commonplace. A group of young people congregate every evening at our local shopping precinct. There may be as few as 10 on some evenings, but up to 20 on warm spring and summer evenings. Most of them are harmless, but a few – out of their minds on lethal mixtures of vodka and cider – break away from the main group every evening and damage local property, breaking down fences, scrawling “tags” on walls, scratching parked cars and ripping off car aerials. The police do little, as they have to catch someone in the act of vandalism or find a reliable witness. Witnesses are loath to come forward, and local people refrain from confronting the youngsters for fear of being attacked – as happened on one occasion recently when a middle-aged adult who reprimanded a youngster for throwing down litter in the street was badly beaten up and ended up in hospital. No witnesses came forward.

OK, I am beginning to sound like a grumpy old man… I have to say, however, that the teacher who shot an air rifle at a group of youngsters (recently in the headlines in the UK) is regarded by most of my neighbours as a hero.

John writes:

A recent survey shows that people crave joy and excitement. However, as people get older, they find it more and more difficult to achieve these feelings.

I took early retirement from teaching in 1993 – the wisest decision in my life. I’ve enjoyed 12 stress-free years. I reach the age of 63 in June, still enjoying good health and vitality.

I went downhill skiing this year in January and March. I still get an incredible buzz schussing at 30 mph down a wide, flattish blue run, skis parallel all the way. But black runs tend to scare me now; my muscles and bones are not up to the strain, and I need fun, not challenges, these days. Then there’s the apres-ski: busy bars with people of all ages having a great time singing hopelessly out of tune on karaoke evenings.

I play golf during the spring and summer, and I look forward to the sheer joy of hitting the occasional great shot that lands within three feet of the hole. In both skiing and golf I enjoy the fresh air, the beautiful scenery and – on my local golf courses – the abundance of wild life on view: mad March hares scampering across the fairway, the sound of a green woodpecker drumming on an old tree, the little monkjack deer that suddenly shoot out from the undergrowth and put you off your shot.

I walk at least a mile with my pet greyhound every day. This year I have been enthralled by the white carpet of snowdrops that covered our local churchyard and adjacent woods, followed by the primroses and daffodils – and now the bluebells are already growing quickly and will soon be in bloom. What a sight!

My wife Sally (10 months younger than me) and I visited the Grand Canyon four years ago. Our first sight of that huge hole in the ground took our breath away. We’ll never forget that experience. After that, we drove on to Las Vegas – which is pure, totally over-the-top entertainment and exciting in an entirely different way. Last year we went on a cruise from Vancouver to Alaska. Our excitement when we approached the spectacular Hubbard Glacier matched that which we experienced on our visit to the Grand Canyon. Then there were the 12 bald eagles hovering in the sky over Ketchikan, the tail of a humpback whale diving for food, an orca leaping out of the sea – what more can I say?

Sally and I also enjoy the simple pleasures in life, a candlelit dinner at home with a bottle of good wine, a barbecue on our patio filled with the warmth from a wood-burning chimenea when it gets cold in the evening, a visit to our local pub where we can chat with friends and solve all the world’s problems. And our first granddaughter, born in June last year, is a constant source of joy - pleasure without the pain. We are not finding it difficult to achieve joy and excitement. Life has never been better!

I like Macs. My daughter runs a graphic design business: 100% Mac hardware and software - which is the sine qua non in the print and design industry in the UK.

I am a PC user. I have to be as I develop and sell software to UK schools, which are around 95% PC users according to our customer records (around 5500 schools). We used to develop software on both platforms, but by the mid-90s it was clear that Macs were losing out to PCs in the educational sector in the UK, so now we only develop and sell software for PCs.

PCs annoy me, however. My personal PC crashes or hangs around five times per day, for no apparent reason. I am still using Win98SE, which is more or less reliable with all its bug fixes and patches installed. I refuse to upgrade to Microsoft's latest operating systems as soon as they appear as they tend to be field-tested by Microsoft's customers for two years before they eventually settle down.

I used to be plagued by viruses and spam emails, but I haven't received a virus from any source for around 8-9 months - maybe because I am using Win98SE and because most virus writers attack the latest operating systems, which are full of holes. I suffered a massive spam attack in July 2004 - around 1000 per day - which forced me to change my business email address and munge the new address into a Web contact form. I no longer display my business email address on the Web. Since then, I have received no more than six spam emails per day.

WorldCALL is the worldwide professional association for teachers and educators interested in Computer Assisted Language Learning.

WorldCALL has already held two major international conferences:

WorldCALL 1998, Melbourne, Australia:

http://www.fredriley.org.uk/call/events/worldcall98.htm

WorldCALL 2003, Banff, Canada, hosted jointly by the University of Alberta and the University of Calgary.

We have had to abandon the old WorldCALL website at http://www.worldcall.org for the time being. Due to problems beyond our control it has proved impossible to update the information it contained, so a new WorldCALL website has been set up at the Polytechnic University of Valencia Spain. Special thanks are due to Ana Gimeno-Sanz for enabling us to make this arrangement so quickly and effortlessly. The new URL is:

http://www.upv.es/worldcall/

In the near future we will be issuing a call for bids to host WorldCALL 2008, so keep an eye on the new website!

I've checked out a few Wikipedia entries relating to my own area of expertise: ICT and language learning. They were almost useless, containing out-of-date and inaccurate information, as well as a strong element of self-promotion. I corrected some of the more glaring errors, but I have to say that I cannot recommend Wikipedia as a reliable source of information.

David writes:

Graham was making the point that a well-defined need (the ability to communicate in basic Polish, necessary for a short professional visit to the country) can lead to an appropriate and effective learning solution (a CD-ROM, easily and conveniently accessed at home). When we match well-defined problems with concrete, tried and tested solutions, it's a win-win situation. This is exactly my conviction too and I've made this point over and over again in this thread.

Hear, hear! I chose a CD-ROM because I could run it on my lap-top anytime, anywhere. I might have used the Web, but few of the websites that I found offered audio materials (100% essential) and none offered listen / record / playback facilities (also 100% essential in my view). I have to admit that I also took a pocket phrasebook with me to Poland - still very useful.

Using ICT in order to learn a foreign language is, of course, not the only solution. I had to learn basic Hungarian in the early 1990s - survival skills that I needed on frequent professional visits to Hungary. Initially I made some progress with a book and an audiocassette, but I quickly got to the point where I needed a teacher. The project on which I was working allowed me to appoint a personal tutor, so I did. She was great, and I became confident in coping with a variety of situations: ordering in restaurants, buying train tickets, making polite conversation, etc.

Just got back from beautiful Krakow, Poland. In an earlier email I worte:

I’m just off to Poland for a few days. I’ll let you know if the CD-ROM I have been using to practise pronunciation worked.

Yes, it worked! I was able to understand most spoken courtesies and (importantly) numbers, as in prices of drinks, taxi journeys, etc. People seemed to understand me too. So I have been able to acquire a few basic listening and speaking skills in Polish entirely on my own initiative using ICT. I could have achieved the same aim with an audiocassette or an audio CD, but the listen / respond / playback activities offered by the EuroTalk CD-ROMs that I have been using are much, much more convenient.

The EuroTalk CD-ROMs, by the way, are currently bestsellers in the UK and have featured in the language competitions for children at the London Language Show in 2003 and 2004.

Regarding pronunication: A language course that does not offer practise in speaking skills is not a complete course, regardless of the media used to deliver it.

One of the reasons why free websites suddenly become commercial is an increase in their popularity. I know of three teachers who set up free websites that became so popular that their hosting services “capped” the number of daily visits to their sites and imposed higher monthly fees. Two of the teachers then introduced a subscription charge to cover their higher fees. The third of the three teachers is still looking around for a hosting service that will allow an unlimited number of daily visits to her site without imposing an increased monthly fee.

This is part of a growing “pay-as-you-go” trend. My broadband service provider is introducing a sliding scale of fees next month, which means that “bandwidth hogs” who download gigabytes of MP3 music files every day may be charged up to 300 pounds per month. I am a modest user, however, and as from next month will be charged less for double the bandwidth that I am currently using.

David asks:

Does primary school foreign language learning fully compensate for the reduction of the status of modern foreign languages in key stage 4 (14- to 16-year-olds) from compulsory to voluntary subjects, resulting in many students abandoning MFL study at age 14?

No, I don't think it does compensate for the reduction in the status of foreign languages at secondary school level. This is not to say, however, that the study of foreign languages should not start at primary school level. The longer a child is exposed to a foreign language the better. Perhaps one should take a look at the way foreign languages are handled in the UK private schools sector. Children attending private schools tend to start learning a foreign language earlier than in the state sector and then what they have learned feeds into the private secondary schools - which tend to draw on groups of primary schools that have followed the same broad foreign languages curriculum. This is where our state schools tend to be a bit chaotic and why the primary languages initiative did not work well the last time around. I taught in a state secondary school in the 1960s and early 1970s. Some of our feeder schools taught French and some did not - which was not an ideal state of affairs.

I manage two websites:

http://www.ict4lt.org

http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk

The first site is completely free. It's a set of ICT training materials for language teachers originally set up with the aid of EC funding. We also offer a CD-ROM version of the English-language part of the site, but we sell about 6 of these per year - at the princely sum of 17 pounds plus VAT! There is a printed version of the main modules too (3 books), but sales of the books were poor to begin with and are now non-existent. The site gets around 600-plus hits per day and, although it's peppered with discussion topics and invitations to comment on the materials, I get around 6-10 emails per month via the feedback form from visitors to the site, half of which offer corrections of errors and indications of dead links, the remainder being mostly irrelevant comments/questions from people who haven't bothered to read what the site is all about - I am losing faith in people's ability to read, especially from a computer screen. I don't receive one penny of payment for maintaining this site. I do it for fun.

The second site is my business site, but it also contains free materials. It gets around 40-50 hits per day, some of which turn into sales. It's therefore a reasonable generator of income.

I am not convinced by the arguments that have been raised regarding eLCs (e-Learning Credits). The scheme is completely daft. Since the Curriculum Online initiative has been in operation, the main criterion for choosing software appears to be eLC-eligibility. This is one of the first questions that teachers ask. During the first two years of the operation of Curriculum Online we noticed a mad, mad rush to get rid of eLC funding before the end of the budget year on 31 August. We were literally flooded with orders in July and early August in 2003 ands 2004 - most of the orders having been put together in a rush, which is clear from the way in which crucial information about the software required was missing on the order forms. Sales during the remaining months of the last two years were poor - and are still declining.

It seems that some teachers will just buy anything in order to get rid of the eLC money at the end of the budget year. Discrimination appears to have gone overboard. Most of the software in our catalogue is not eLC-eligible, because it is produced abroad and overseas producers have not the faintest idea how to register their products with Curriculum Online. Language teachers are therefore now faced with a limited choice of British-produced products.

Finally, the eLC funding in the first two years of the operation of the initiative was underspent by a large margin. It appears that schools do not want/need what is on offer.

The expectation that the Web will provide a never-ending source of free materials has done us a lot of damage. Our sales of software have dropped by around 50% in the last two years. We'll survive for while, but in around 2-3 years I'll probably find something else to amuse me.

I've worked with several people on different EC-funded language projects in which CLIL was a prominent feature. You'll find it mentioned several times in a report that Tony Fitzpatrick and I edited for the EC:

Fitzpatrick A. & Davies G. (eds.) (2003) The Impact of Information and Communications Technologies on the Teaching of Foreign Languages and on the Role of Teachers of Foreign Languages. This is a comprehensive report commissioned by the EC Directorate General of Education and Culture, which can be downloaded in PDF or Word format from the ICC website: http://www.icc-europe.com - click on "Report on ICT in FLL".

I met David Marsh in Finland in 2002, just after the EUROCALL conference in Jyväskylä, where we gathered data for the above report. I was also involved in three different projects at The University Ca' Foscari in Venice, notably ICT4LT: http://www.ict4lt.org

Small World!

I’m just off to Poland for a few days. I’ll let you know if the CD-ROM I have been using to practise pronunciation worked.

A couple of references:

The software advertised at this website, Eyepeak, seems to offer some potential for pronunciation practice:

http://www.eyespeak.info

So does the software at the Sky Software site:

http://www.skysoftwarehouse.com/pronunciation.html

The Encounters series of CD-ROMs (published by Hodder & Stoughton), which we began to work on back in 1993, offered the possibility of role-plays into which students could slot their own recordings. They could make as many attempts as they liked and then save their best effort on to flopy disk, which could then be marked by the teacher:

http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/encounters.htm

Feedback from students in an extensive evaluation study indicated that this was one of the most useful aspects of the Encounters series

I’m just off to Poland for a few days. I’ll let you know if the CD-ROM I have been using to practise pronunciation worked.

A couple of references:

The software advertised at this website, Eyepeak, seems to offer some potential for pronunciation practice:

http://www.eyespeak.info

So does the software at the Sky Software site:

http://www.skysoftwarehouse.com/pronunciation.html

The Encounters series of CD-ROMs (published by Hodder & Stoughton), which we began to work on back in 1993, offered the possibility of role-plays into which students could slot their own recordings. They could make as many attempts as they liked and then save their best effort on to flopy disk, which could then be marked by the teacher:

http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/encounters.htm

Feedback from students in an extensive evaluation study indicated that this was one of the most useful aspects of the Encounters series

YES! Pronunciation is crucial to making oneself understood. I can cite numerous occasions on which I have been stopped by foreign tourists in London asking the way and have had to ask them to repeat the name of the destination several times before I could give them any help. To digest what I have written elsewhere:

CD-ROMs enable pronunciation practice to be achieved more efficiently than the old AAC tape recorder, because you don’t have the problem of rewinding and finding where a recording/playback starts and finishes. As for such a task being descibed as “too behaviouristic”, this is just an ideology. In the early stages of language learning, e.g. in the stage that I am at right now, struggling to get my tongue round unfamiliar sounds in Polish, I need lots and lots of practice, i.e. my behaviour patterns need to be altered. I am happy to accept this.

Automatic Speech Recognition is getting better but it's still no substitute for the human ear.

Dalibor asks:

Well, do we really need the Internet to do this particular task? Shouldn’t we use the Internet (and the multimedia school books) in the areas where they are superior all others pedagogical resources. And at the same time not forgot that a simple tape-recorder is still good enough in many situations in today’s education.

No, we don’t need the Internet for this particular task, which is why I always advocate using a blend of Internet and CD-ROM resources. CD-ROMs enable this task to be achieved more efficiently than the old AAC tape recorder, because you don’t have the problem of rewinding and finding where a recording/playback starts and finishes. As for such a task being “too behaviouristic”, this is just an ideology. In the early stages of language learning, e.g. in the stage that I am at right now, struggling to get my tongue round unfamiliar sounds in Polish, I need lots and lots of practice, i.e. my behaviour patterns need to be altered. I am happy to accept this. I agree 100% with David:

One consequence has been that the official experts on language learning here tend to have a huge blind spot when it comes to the teaching and learning of how to pronounce languages. In turn, this means that they tend to have a knee-jerk reaction to anything connected with pronunciation practice, assuming it to be crude behaviourist audio-lingualism.

I went to an open day at The Ashcombe School, Dorking, last week. The Head of Modern Foreign Languages, Helen Myers, does not allow younger children to access the Internet during class time as it is not very productive. She uses mainly CD-ROM resources that help the children acquire listening and pronunciation skills. We observed children (aged around 11-12) working on selected CD-ROMs and then we (most of us were teachers) were challenged to use a CD-ROM to learn how to recognise and pronounce the numbers 1-20 in Mandarin Chinese. It worked!

See: http://www.ashcombe.surrey.sch.uk/Curriculum/modlang/

Regarding John's comment on films in Sweden being subtitled rather than dubbed, I have two Dutch friends in Rotterdam who regularly watch BBC TV. They make extensive use of the subtitles for the deaf (closed captions) when watching a programme in which the language is delivered too quickly or in an unfamiliar accent. Once they get used to the language they switch off the subtitles. There is a good deal of research that shows how closed captions can contribute to the development of listening skills. Robert Vanderplank is/was one of the leading researchers in this area. My two Dutch friends certainly have few problems understanding English and have near-native English accents

Games are considered to be an essential part of teaching in my subject area, Modern Foreign Languages. I used games of various sorts in my lessons long before computers became affordable for schools and long before some members of this Forum were born (I am now approaching 63). Have you heard of Kar2ouche? See: http://www.kar2ouche.com

"Games are a waste of time." Rubbish! Computer games involving a language-learning task or games such as Sim City that can be utilised for language-learning tasks make a valuable contribution to language learning - and stacks of literature have been written about this topic.

As a language teacher I am appalled by the poor quality of most Web-based materials relating to my subject area. CD-ROMs are superior in many respects, e.g. I have yet to see a website for language learners that offers the possibility of listening to a word or phrase, recording it and playing it back - so that the learner can hear what he/she sounds like. This is what I consider to be a sine qua non of language learning in the early stages - an activity that has been possible since the advent of the first affordable tape recorders in the 1950s. Yes, the Internet does offer many exciting possibilities, but there are an awful lot of point-and-click-let's-move-on-quick websites that offer very little in terms of interaction and appear to have learned nothing from the early days of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), when discrete intrinsic and extrinsic feedback played a key role. I am currently learning basic Polish via a set of three CD-ROMs (in anticipation of two forthcoming visits to Poland) that allow me to record and play back and record my own voice - essential for building up one's confidence in coming to terms with those difficult Polish consonant clusters! I searched in vain for a website that offered such a possibility.

Surely there is a lot of data to be collected from bilingual schools? We have such schools on our doorstep here in Wales, where History, Maths, Geography etc are taught both in English and in Welsh. I can't provide data myself, but presumably the National Assembly for Wales can point someone in the right direction. If you search in Google under "teaching through the medium of Welsh" a lot of relevant info comes up.

I have a friend who works in a bilingual school in Austria. He is a German native speaker, but he teaches in English as well as in German. I think he teaches subjects such as the Cinema in English and in German. I am meeting him this weekend. I'll mention this topic to him.

I must admit New Labour has confused me. For me it is not so much a question of right- or left-wing policies but more of an issue concerning control over education – and most other things. This government has simply continued the control-freak policies introduced by the Thatcher government and, in many cases, strengthened them. We now have the National Curriculum, OFSTED, Curriculum Online and a host of other controlling initiatives that seek to leave teachers with fewer and fewer choices of what they teach and how they teach it. Basically, this government doesn’t appear to trust teachers any more. I am now retired and, thankfully, out of the rat race, but I feel disinclined to vote Labour again. Labour stands no chance of winning the seat in the constituency where I leave, and this time around I am more likely to look carefully at the personalities of the candidates rather than the parties that they support.

I like the points that John Dieter makes. A few years ago I wrote this as an introduction to an article:

I have a friend who owns a fruit and vegetables business in a London wholesale market. Back in the early 1980s he approached me for advice about acquiring a computer. “Why do you need a computer?” I asked. “Well,” he said, “all the other dealers are getting them, and I don’t want to be left behind.” I suggested that a computer might help him with his accounts and customer records, but this was not what he had in mind. He was more interested in predicting market trends. I quizzed him about the nature of his business. One important feature that emerged in the course of our conversation was that the wholesaler in his line of business makes a real killing when he is the first to get hold of a batch of a new crop, for example Guernsey tomatoes. “How do you find out when the new crop is about to come on the market?” I asked. “I just listen to the whispers,” he answered. “Keep listening to the whispers,” I replied. My friend now uses an accounting package, but he’s still listening to the whispers – and driving a Porsche.