Communication Accommodation Theory : A Theoretical Standpoint

A parent or carer of an individual may have other preferences for the individual’s way of communicating compared to other parents/other family members/ carers.

Communication theories are important to learn and understand. Learning these theories helps us apply the theory to our own life. It helps our critical thinking skills as well as benefits one to understand the value of research that has been accomplished in this field. Understanding communication theories can help us make sense of our daily life experiences. There are three Communication theories that I have studied that have touched on my personal and professional life. These theories are Communication Privacy Management, Social Penetration Theory, and Organizational Culture Theory.

There are times when we need to adapt our communication style to meeting the needs of individuals and use aids to help them enhance their communication.

Communication can be adapted very easily, usually without you realising. However, the style used can make a big difference, and help build and maintain positive relationships.

Communication involves more than exchanging words between people. Gestures, postures, facial expressions and even eye contacts are important during communication. Both verbal and nonverbal cues are important during communication and can help a person understand the speaker or listener’s emotions, attitudes or status. Understanding the existence of various cultures is necessary since different cultures have varying ways of communication (Lustig & Koester, 2012). Therefore, a communication style that is perceived as bad by a culture may be good in another culture. Besides, characteristics that may be essential for a particular culture may be quite irrelevant for another. In line with this dissimilarity, individuals need to adapt carefully and understand communication preferences and desires among cultures.

Explain how people from different backgrounds may use and/ or interpret communication methods in different ways

In earlier years, adults would coo at me as I laughed and sang with my friends, assuming my high pitched and almost indistinguishable speech was simply baby talk. As my classmates and I got older, I noticed everyone was growing out of it, everyone besides me that is. My friends began to speak in a more mature and refined way,

Verbal communication needs to be changed not only depending on age and ability but dependent

People from different backgrounds may use and/or interpret communication methods in different ways because every family has their own way of communicating together. For example: some children might hear or speak more than one language at home or they could hear others swearing. This can affect children’s communication and how they communicate as adults.

In Deborah Tannen’s book You Just Don’t Understand, she discusses themes such as power, conflict, and linguistic styles from childhood in chapters seven through ten. Based on her research, one’s experiences from early childhood to adulthood can affect their communication style due to the types of conversations they had during their formative years. For example, Tannen suggests that conversational styles are different due to experiences where conversations were either constant in the home or conversations were limited and rarely occurred. She writes “It may be that one person grew up in a home where conversation was constant and all offers of food overlapped ongoing talk, while another grew up in a home where talk was sparse and good was offered only when there was a lull in the conversation,” (p. 192).

In this paper, I will use CAT (Communication Accommodation Theory) to explain how convergence, divergence, and intergroup contact are illustrated within the film American History X.

Theory explains how individual act toward things on the basis of the meanings they ascribe to those things. The meaning comes

In interpersonal communication there are many theories that are similar yet different in many ways. The theories can be combined to describe people and how those people interact and communicate with each other. Many of these theories help explain how people in society form impressions of others, how they maintain these impressions, why people interact with certain people in society, and how people will use these impressions that they have formed later on in life. These theories also help people to better understand themselves, to better understand interpersonal communication, and to better understand people in general. There are two theories in interpersonal communication that, despite their differences, can go hand in hand. The first is

Intentionally or intuitively, we constantly use convergence and divergence in our daily communication routine. While the process itself is automatic; the manner of not doing either does not exist, because one of the two is always being chosen. Convergence is the process of adapting ones speech style to match others they want to identify and divergence is the use of linguistic mannerisms that emphasizes a person’s differences from others. A person would be able to understand these two concepts through personal examples by comparing and contrasting the differences in each term, discussing what aspects of these communicative techniques were conscious and which were

When communicators exhibit associative behaviors, they are utilizing verbal and nonverbal tactics that adapt to their conversational partner. Higher social status or power and commonalities between the individuals may explain why they are willing to do so. In attempt to demonstrate associative behavior, these individuals will partake in accommodation. According to the Communication Accommodation Theory, the interactants converge either upward or downward, unimodal or multimodal, or symmetrical or asymmetrical in order to adapt to the conversational setting (Zhang & Imamura, 2017). For instance, adults would speak slowly and use simple vocabulary when talking with children. In A Class Divided, the teacher would converge downward for her third-grade students to understand the concepts.