Teaching elderly learners in Taiwan - relational perceptions and communication accommodation

As inspired by the Notion of the Third Age, it is common for people to pursue an active post-retirement later life, such as, through the engagement in later life learning activities. One purpose is to increase the sense of positive ageing. That is why this study focuses on senior education as the institutional context to examine language and communication with the elderly. The main concern is that language is the main tool in classroom interactions and how language is used by teachers to challenge or reinforce certain pre-existing (ageist) stereotypes about or cultural attitudes towards older people becomes an important question to ask. Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) is the theoretical framework guiding the semi-structured interviews with teachers working in senior education to explore whether they modify their language styles to adapt to elderly learners’ conversational needs in class. This paper only presents one dimension of CAT, that is, the presumed relations and roles in association with language accommodation decisions. Teachers are presumed to have power over students but in the senior educational contexts, teachers are very likely younger than their students and therefore, intergenerational communication might emerge naturally in teacher-student interactions. In Taiwan, youngsters might perceive themselves less powerful than older people or those senior to them. Therefore, how power asymmetry in relation to the different facets of teacher-student relationships in senior educational contexts could also be an interesting topic to discuss.