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