Communication Accommodation Theory
Erfurt, DE -- Our first week discussion will have us talking Communication Accommodation Theory , first introduced to the field of human communication by noted scholar Dr. Howard "Howie" Giles of the University of California - Santa Barbara. In general, the theory attempts to explain how individuals come to adapt their communicative styles to one another as they spend more time with each other. While the theory is not specifically or uniquely restricted to the study of intercultural communication, it is not hard to see how the theory might help explain variance in both our initial and continued interactions with folks from another culture; after all, one way we can understand cultural differences is in terms of communicative behavioral differences (both at the verbal and non-verbal level). A particularly interesting phenomenon associated with this is that of code-switching , which tends to really get at folks who are bi- o...