Accommodation theory states that when people talk to each other, they adjust their behavior and manner of speech to take account of, "to accommodate", the topic, the circumstances, and the other people engaged with them in the conversation. For example: people talk more slowly to foreigners and use baby talk when interacting with infants. The way people communicate with each other is central to the kind of social interaction at issue.
Thus, friends and lovers, and especially people in the process of becoming friends and lovers, make every effort to converge in manner, accent, tone and topic. Someone wishing to keep his distance or disagree will always adopt a manner of speaking, expressing differently from that of the other party.
These ideas matter because it is clear that difficulties experienced by immigrants and foreigners everwhere arise in part from the difference of their speech mannerisms, and the limits tot their ability to 'converge' with native speakers when trying to communicate. As world globalizes further at an increasingly rapid pace, and as a major migrations of people especially from the southern to the northern hemisphere continue, so the problems and too often frictions increase: accommodation theory, for all its surface simplicity, gives insights into how miscommunication and misinterpretation happen and how matters can be improved.
Accommodation theory was devised in the early 1970's by Howard Giles, whose first insights into communication came while working in a medical clinic in Wales. He wrote "the patients I took to the physicians just had to open their mouths and speak and I could predict the manner in which the physicians were going to deal with them." The ideas he developed have been applied by advertisers and party political researchers in thinking about the effective ways of getting the message across the target audience, and by business management training, advising clients on how to behave in foreign countries.
The limits of accommodation theory are illustrated by the latter. Studies found that efforts used by western businessmen who over accommodated in order to please or partners among Japanese businessmen were in fact counterproductive. The danger is that behaviour which appears to involve mimicry of others can look like mockery; in the Japanese case the businessmen from Japan preferred the foreigners to foreigners.
Accommodation theory is of particular value among other things, thinking about ways of integrating immigrant communities into host communities, where integration is a term between assimilation and multiculturalism, just means providing a way for immigrants who to get along with the host communities to succeed economically. With mass immigration has come the realization that it is ineffective to expect immigrants to do all accommodation, and that has resulted in host community adjustments to take account of linguistic and cultural factors.
Thus, friends and lovers, and especially people in the process of becoming friends and lovers, make every effort to converge in manner, accent, tone and topic. Someone wishing to keep his distance or disagree will always adopt a manner of speaking, expressing differently from that of the other party.
These ideas matter because it is clear that difficulties experienced by immigrants and foreigners everwhere arise in part from the difference of their speech mannerisms, and the limits tot their ability to 'converge' with native speakers when trying to communicate. As world globalizes further at an increasingly rapid pace, and as a major migrations of people especially from the southern to the northern hemisphere continue, so the problems and too often frictions increase: accommodation theory, for all its surface simplicity, gives insights into how miscommunication and misinterpretation happen and how matters can be improved.
Accommodation theory was devised in the early 1970's by Howard Giles, whose first insights into communication came while working in a medical clinic in Wales. He wrote "the patients I took to the physicians just had to open their mouths and speak and I could predict the manner in which the physicians were going to deal with them." The ideas he developed have been applied by advertisers and party political researchers in thinking about the effective ways of getting the message across the target audience, and by business management training, advising clients on how to behave in foreign countries.
The limits of accommodation theory are illustrated by the latter. Studies found that efforts used by western businessmen who over accommodated in order to please or partners among Japanese businessmen were in fact counterproductive. The danger is that behaviour which appears to involve mimicry of others can look like mockery; in the Japanese case the businessmen from Japan preferred the foreigners to foreigners.
Accommodation theory is of particular value among other things, thinking about ways of integrating immigrant communities into host communities, where integration is a term between assimilation and multiculturalism, just means providing a way for immigrants who to get along with the host communities to succeed economically. With mass immigration has come the realization that it is ineffective to expect immigrants to do all accommodation, and that has resulted in host community adjustments to take account of linguistic and cultural factors.
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