Accommodation

Accommodation is the natural tendency to adjust one's speech — accent, pace, vocabulary, complexity — to match or diverge from an interlocutor's speech patterns. Communication Accommodation Theory (Giles, 1973) identifies two main strategies: convergence (shifting toward the other speaker's style to signal solidarity) and divergence (maintaining or exaggerating differences to assert identity).

Relevance for ELT

Rather than teaching toward a single native-speaker target, accommodation foregrounds learners' ability to adapt to the diverse accents and styles they will encounter in real-world communication, particularly in English as a Lingua Franca contexts.

Practical techniques:

• Shadowing — imitate natural-speed speech from varied speakers to build flexibility
• Diverse accent exposure — use listening materials featuring L1 and L2 varieties of English
• Cross-L1 dictation — learners dictate to partners from different L1 backgrounds, forcing both speakers to accommodate