In order to collect non-careful, casual speech, arrange for your subjects (yourself and the contrastive speaker) to describe an exciting, frightening, amazing, amusing etc incident they have been part of, discuss something they find particularly annoying, enjoyable, moving, recount an important event in their life, and so on (anything so they will be focussing on what they are talking about, rather than upon how they are saying it). You want to record enough language to be representative of the respective speakers' pronunciations, but in the interests of efficiency try to keep the amount you record to manageable limits. Remember, you may want to lead in to the recording with some casual conversation to put the subject at ease and to increase the chances that you will elicit relatively natural language. It's usually best to begin with the casual conversation and then move on to the word list. (Some people will worry about speaking `correctly' or in what they think of as an `educated' manner, and will alter their normal pronunciation accordingly. Try to minimise the chances of this happening.) In order to record your own speech, you may want to invite a friend to ask you questions or to chat with you, rather than simply talking into a microphone.
