 His book "Doing Phonology" written with John Kelly provides a radical contemporary take on FPA.Arising out of work which combined detailed phonetic analysis and Conversation Analysis (French and Local 1983) his recent research has explored the interactional functioning of phonetic detail and phonetic variation in talk-in-interaction (Local and Walker 2005).According to Ford and Couper-Kuhlen (2004), Local's work 'has been seminal in founding a phonology for conversation.