- Thank you, that's a good question. While I was at the University of Birmingham I was in charge of a group of Japanese secondary school teachers of English - some junior high school, some senior high school teachers of English who came over the Japanese government scholarship. And they had learned English and they'd learnt it to an expert level and they were very good at speaking but they were kind of lost when it came to interacting around the university and around the city. Because all kinds of unexpected things happened and they were kind of bamboozled by the kind of language that came at them and they found it quite difficult to understand. So I said to them: well it's a jungle out there compared to what you're used to in the classroom. And then I promptly forgot it. But the following day somebody came in wearing a T-shirt with a jungle pattern on and was extremely disappointed when I didn't notice it. I was mortified myself of course but I suddenly realised: ah, that's a powerful metaphor and so I developed the greenhouse idea at the other end, but without the garden, and then I gave a seminar at the University of Birmingham and somebody came up at the end and said: but what about the connected speech rules? And then I said: ah, that's the garden and so that's the power of the question you see. All of a sudden somebody asks you a question that you hadn't thought of, but the answers there, but it wouldn't have come out if they hadn't asked the questions. So from then on whenever I used it people took it up and they were using it immediately so I thought: oh, this is really powerful. You can use it descriptively and you can use it practically for other activities in the classroom.

So the greenhouse form of language of what the citation form if you like. For example "everyone always does this" so the words are separate like plants in a pot carefully nurtured as individual and presented one by one. They don't come into contact. The garden is where the words come into a gentle genteel contact according to the rules of connected speech. "Everyone always does this, everyone always does this" so that's the garden. The garden isn't always as boring is that or is monotonic. That would be a more reasonable garden version but in the jungle all rules and expectations stop and language becomes very messy.

- Thank you for that question, that's a good question. Even at the very beginner level they give slow and fast versions of certain sentences. They are there, you have the two versions side by side one is very tame garden and the other actors are instructed to speak it's just do a fast version of that. Those are jungle forms. The past questions are really jungle. Let's pretend that one of the sentences is "my boyfriend sometimes takes my things". So which in the slow version is something like "my boyfriend sometimes takes my things" and the fast would go something like "my boyfriend sometimes takes my things". And so the faster one is very much messy and jungle-like and the slow one is very much in the garden and quite close to the greenhouse.
- Something we tried to decode today, you give us some bits of Outcomes beginners audio and we were like a whole group of English teachers ... It was about "how much are they” or "how much per day" or "how much..." - Yes, so in the fast version of something given in the beginners book the "how much are they" in the fast version is "how much are they" - something like that. And I isolated the last two words. The sound substance of the last two words "are they". And I ask people what they made of made of it and we came up with a list of about 10 things that people thought it meant. - So including "did they, do they, good day". - What that Illustrated is there are lots of reasonable hearings of their sound substance that people come up with that are responsible attempts to try and represent what's there in the in the jungle forms. And the jungle forms are messy, unpredictable and surprising. And so yes there in the beginner level. One conclusion you might reach from hearing me speak about my work is that it doesn't apply to beginner level but it does because you can take any set of words and give them a jungle treatment. So a standard thing in the old fashioned textbooks was "this is a pen". Greenhouse - "this is a pen. Garden - "this is a pen". Jungle - "sss pen".

- Yeah absolutely. Introduce the metaphor from the very beginning.

- The listening lesson can be attached to any components of a course book but that's too long a story to go to go into right now. Let's imagine that we want to make a recording for listening purposes and I think the idea of doing a slow version and the fast one is really good but instructing the actors to do things a certain way. So well in the slow thing they're good at, they couldn't because they're experienced actors and their directors are experienced but then training that the director is probably from the publisher to instruct the actors to do things with word clusters such as well "I'm gonna, I'm gonna" do in the fast version to do things like that. And just to do to train them to or to get them to forget their training in terms of recordings for English language textbook and to imagine that they're in a film a fast-moving film where they get to decide what happens how they say it and what happens happening around them as they're saying it. And above all to speak fast. So get those jungle recordings done and then come back and do some materials writing around those.
- I see, still not scripted listening but more of like a framework for listening? - Well you can do that with scripted you can start with your script but before you finish writing the materials around it the activities around it you take it into the recording studio and you say to actors well what I've just explained “do it wild, do it, just do it wild” and then bring that back so and of course book authors hopefully have read my stuff and they can hear jungle effects and then make it make a feature of them.

- That's a really good question. I think what you need to do is to let go of the idea that there's a correct way of saying something. There's a whole variety of ways of saying anything and you can find these on the internet in the Ted corpus search engine and in youglish and other sites. Devote some time to very short examples mouthing the mimic, mimicking them listen to them slow and fast and normal speech which you can adjust speeds on the on these sites but realizing that the difficulty this is so important realizing that the difficulty you have with listening is not your fault. It's the fault of English language teaching which pretends that English when spoken is much tidier than it actually is. English, when spoken naturally, is untidy it's indeterminate it's in between it’s mushy and that's a fact that makes it difficult for people who are learning to listen. So the fault is not with you, the fault is with them, with the inherent nature of English but perhaps it's wrong to call it a fault - it's just in the nature of things. So if you can say it's not my fault, it's this language spoken naturally but don't be angry because that's the nature of things.