Investigating the use of accommodation strategies in the conversation task of the Graded Examinations in Spoken English

Davila Perez, Geisa and Harding, Luke and Pill, John (2025) Investigating the use of accommodation strategies in the conversation task of the Graded Examinations in Spoken English. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

Accommodation strategies (i.e., Translanguaging, Paraphrase, Repetition) have been found to contribute to effective communication in ELF settings. However, while accommodation is central to conceptualisations of ELF, accommodation strategies and related phenomena (e.g., repair) are often negatively viewed in the Language Proficiency Interview (LPI), as evidence of candidates’ low proficiency and/or a source of interlocutor variation. Since unscripted LPIs may be considered ELF encounters, research is needed on how accommodation strategies manifest in this exam format and on examiners’ perceptions of these features. I addressed these issues by investigating examiner and candidate use of accommodation strategies in the conversation task in the Graded Examinations in Spoken English (GESE), a communication-oriented speaking test administered by Trinity College London. The study followed an exploratory sequential design and included Clarification request, Confirmation check and Comprehension check under the umbrella term “accommodation strategies”. In Phase 1, I conducted a Corpus Pragmatics study to explore frequency and dispersion patterns of accommodation strategies and their perceived functions across proficiency levels and speaker roles. Data were selected from 2,053 conversation task performances in the Trinity Lancaster Corpus, a sub-corpus comprising 1,674,680 tokens. In Phase 2, 12 GESE examiners from different experience groups were interviewed about accommodation strategies, and the data were analysed thematically. The most common accommodation strategies observed were Clarification request, Repetition, Confirmation check, Paraphrase and Translanguaging. Frequency and dispersion patterns varied across proficiency levels and speaker roles, but there were no clear relationships. Moreover, similarities and differences in the expression of the strategies were found due to the speakers’ disparate discourse identities. Phase 2 results showed individual examiner variation due to the context-bound and subjective nature of accommodation strategies rather than experience only. The study contributes to a better understanding of accommodation strategies in LPIs from an ELF-aware perspective and provides implications for examiner training.