Personal Jungles

Alex I like the idea of a personal jungle for each learner (a new idea for me, today!), and their mispronunciations (fossilized) as being something fluid, explorable, and amenable to change – using the Greenhouse-Garden-Jungle continuum. I think that taking learners into the jungle – a rule-free zone – and getting them to play there (vocal gymnastically) might loosen up their inhibitions about improving their pronunciation.

Image from here

Mark – three lovely questions. My view is that the jungles will resemble each other in certain ways, but will not be entirely similar (they won’t ‘necessarily resemble native speaker jungles’). The processes of squeezing and reduction, and the addition of drafting phenomena will apply for the reasons you suggest (‘the same pressures of communicating-as-we-think (ie “on-line”) under real time constraints’). But the outcomes of those processes may have different characteristics (colouring/flavours/scents) for each language background. A different type of jungle, but still a jungle.