A C ommunication A ccommodation A nalysis o f Teacher Student Interaction i n a n E SL Classroom

Abstract

During interactions inthe classroom, most teachers and students make aconscious effort to avoid common mistakes in speaking of Englishlanguage and therefo re adopt certain strategies to communicateeffectively . The study aims to determine the communication strategiesteachers and students adopt to adjust their communication duringclassroom interaction. T he study applies the C ommunicationA ccommodation Theory (CAT') to analy se teacher student interactions inan ESL classroom. Data were sampled from 360 recordings of classroomteaching from three English teachers in a Senior High School in the AgonaEast District in Ghana. It was revealed that strategies such as convergenceand d ivergence were adopted by both teachers and students for a smoothdiscourse .