UK Linguistic Ethnography Forum

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BAAL Cardiff 2002

At the 2002 BAAL Annual Meeting on 12th-14th September 2002 in Cardiff, we held a Special Interest Group Colloquium.  The colloquium abstract follows below.

Colloquium description

Rationale:

The aim of setting up a Special Interest Group in Linguistic Ethnography is to open up a space for focused discussion within BAAL, in which people doing research involving linguistic ethnography can develop the field by presenting and discussing their work, debating methodological issues, and engaging with relevant theoretical writings.  With this in mind, this colloquium has been designed with a tripartite structure.  It opens with a series of short papers which present recent and ongoing work.  The second section, based around an analysis of the co-construction of the research agenda by researcher and researched, raises questions about reflexivity and relations of power in the fieldwork process.  The third engages with a major theorist from outside Linguistic Ethnography, Basil Bernstein, asking what contribution his concept of ‘languages of description’ can make to the ethnographic endeavour.  In order to reflect the principal goal of encouraging dialogue, a significant amount of time has been left open in each session for general discussion.

SECTION 1: INTRODUCTION

Members of the steering group of Linguistic Ethnography SIG will introduce the aims of the SIG and the session.

SECTION 2: RECENT AND ONGOING RESEARCH

2.1  Andrey Rosowsky

PhD Student of University of Sheffield (Department of Educational Studies).   email: rosowsky@yahoo.com

 The role of liturgical literacy in UK Muslim communities

This paper will centre on the complex role played by liturgical literacy in the lives and practices of a northern UK Muslim community. The paper will touch on three related themes:

(1) The use of religion and language as instruments for sustaining hegemony in society by probing the power and authority of the imam in the mediating of liturgical literacy;

(2) The role of religion in the spread, maintenance, and setting the status of languages by revealing the complex tension currently prevailing in respect of mother tongue, schooled and liturgical literacies;

(3) The manner in which diasporic communities, language and religion and group cohesion in immigrant communities are maintained through literacy practices including liturgical literacy.

This paper will take the form of a report on findings so far of a wider-reaching study which seeks to answer the questions: what is liturgical literacy, generally and in the community in question; what role does it play in this community; and how does it relate to other literacies?

            This paper takes as a given that literacy is to be understood as a social practice which relates intimately to the social and cultural context in which it finds itself. Liturgical literacy, in its Islamic form, is a worldwide social practice (Wagner, 1993). However, it is evident that the changing and developing nature of ethnic communities in the UK is significantly shaping the form and function liturgical literacy presently adopts.

2.2  NIGEL MUSK

Dept. of Language & Culture, Linköping University, Sweden.  e-mail: nigmu@isk.liu.se

The Transitional Language Practices of Four Welsh Bilingual Students

This paper forms part of my PhD research into the vitality of Welsh among pupils attending Welsh-medium education in areas where English is the dominant community language.   It reports on the findings of a pilot study focusing on four bilingual students at a university in mid-Wales, all of whom live in a Welsh-language university hall of residence and all of whom belong to the shrinking base of young people from Welsh-speaking homes.   Previously, they had attended the same Welsh-medium secondary school in South Wales, and they reported that there, "it seemed uncool somehow" to speak Welsh and that there had been considerable peer pressure to speak English outside the classroom.  But since moving to mid-Wales, even though their bilingual language patterns were somewhat varied, there has been a clear transition in their language practices.  Through such personal choices as the medium of their continued studies and their choice of hall of residence, the balance for all four students has been tipped in favour of Welsh.

The data for this pilot study consists of two video recordings of this focus group of friends, as well as a questionnaire on their use of Welsh which was subsequently used to aid the interpretation of the recordings.  More generally, the approach adopted in my research belongs essentially to the linguistic ethnographic tradition, incorporating elements of conversation analysis (though not in its purest form) of video-recorded data.  At the same time the research will attempt to draw on the macro sociohistorical context of Wales, where a 'linguistic market' has been successfully created for bilingual education during the last few decades.

2.3            ALLYSON JULE

PhD - Surrey-Roehampton, 2002.   e-mail: amjule@sfu.ca

 An Ethnographic Look: Gendered Use of Linguistic Space in an ESL Classroom

This ethographic study is an exploration of the amount of talk (also referred to as the use of "linguistic space", Mahony, 1985) used by girls as opposed to boys in a grade two ESL classroom, located in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, Canada.  The focus was the amount of language by the girls in teacher-led classroom lessons.  Ethnographic data were collected through videotape observations, which were then transcribed, measured by way of counting words, and analyzed for conversational opportunities.  The findings revealed that being a girl may have impacted participation in the classroom lessons and, by extension, impacted language learning opportunities.  The particular lack of linguistic space in the girls' experience suggests that the girls in this classroom may be limited in language development.  Their silence appeared partially influenced by the teacher's response to student comments.

2.4              ELENA IOANNIDOU

Research and Graduate School of Education, University of Southampton.  e-mail: e.ioannidou@soton.ac.uk

The 'Link' between Language and Ethnic Identity among Greek Cypriot Students: "I am a Bit of That and a Bit of the Other, Miss"

The aim of this paper is to provide an in-depth exploration of the complex and rather dubious link between language and ethnic identity among pre-adolescent children, using ethnographic data to argue the interrelation between the two concepts. It is widely acknowledged that ethnic identity and language are concepts very difficult to define and to track down (Fishman, 1972). The existence of different theoretical approaches (i.e. social psychology, sociolinguistics, sociology of language, sociology) and the adoption of a variety of methodologies, either focusing on identity as a group or as an individual phenomenon, increases the complexity and multiplicity of this interrelation. Furthermore, there is often an imbalance of focus in the studies that seek to establish a correlation between the two, focusing more either on identity (e.g. social psychology) or on language (e.g. sociolinguistics) and seeking to establish a 'link' without providing an in depth exploration and explication of both concepts.

This paper seeks to explore the link between the linguistic repertoire of 11-12 year old Cypriot students and their preferred and alleged ethnic identities, focusing both on their language use and language attitudes and on their claimed and 'observed' identities. A two-fold methodological approach was used where on the first hand, 'Language' was placed in the centre and 'Ethnic Identity' in the periphery and vice versa. The study was an ethnographic case study focusing on a group of 22 students in an urban school in Cyprus, and using as main methods participant observation, interviews, focus groups, questionnaires and identity-tests. The findings were interpreted in the wider socio-political context of Cyprus trying to establish a link between wider context-policy and school-practice.

SECTION 3: REFLEXIVITY AND FIELDWORK

VALLY LYTRA

Dept. of Byzantine & Modern Greek Studies, King's College, University of London, Strand London WC2R 2LS, UK  e-mail: vally.lytra@pobox.com

Colluding to Exclude: The Peer Group and the Researcher

 Research on peer cultures and their members' linguistic repertoires has demonstrated that aspects of peer group cultures are not always transparent to 'an outsider' (such as the researcher) and that access to shared peer group knowledge may be restricted to her (Corsaro & Eder 1990). In this paper, I present and discuss two exchanges during free time that took place between the members of a linguistically and culturally mixed peer group (Greek-speaking monolingual and Greek-Turkish bilingual 4th graders) and myself while I was collecting data for my PhD thesis, at a state-run primary school, in Athens, Greece.

In particular, I examine these exchanges sequentially and interactionally and show how by repeatedly avoiding to address my clarification requests regarding aspects of their 4th grade peer group 'small culture' (Holliday 1999) and by collaboratively teasing the researcher instead the peer group members engage in 'conversational collusion' (McDermott & Tylbor 1995). In doing so, I demonstrate that they reproduce a shared peer group identity that draws its resources from both the majority (i.e. Greek) and minority (i.e. Turkish) languages and cultures. Through the reproduction of this shared peer group identity, peer group members create a 'community of practice' that excludes the researcher from its ranks. I argue that such exchanges highlight that the relationship between the researcher and the researched is not a straightforward hierarchical one and that both parties co-construct the research agenda during data collection (cf. Harvey 1992).

SECTION 4:  THEORETICAL DIALOGUE

Gemma Moss

Institute of Education, University of London.  e-mail: G.Moss@sta01.ioe.ac.uk

Doing Ethnography or Building a Language of Description?

Using data collected as part of an ethnographic enquiry into reading in the junior school, this  paper will set out to explore Bernstein's concept of "languages of description" (Bernstein, 1996) and its potential to illuminate key aspects of the ethnographic endeavour. In particular, the paper will highlight the central role which the language used to describe the empirical object of research plays in both analysis and theory-building, themselves essential prerequisites of the research process.  For Bernstein, the researcher's language of description acts as a translation for, rather than a simple reduplication of,  the language of the researched. But to do so in a principled way, it must evolve simultaneously in two different directions: towards a language of enactment and a language of explanation.   The paper will tease out these distinctions through examination of a range of literacy events collected in four different case study sites.

 Bernstein, B. (1996) Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity.  London: Taylor and Francis

Moss, G. (1999) `Texts in context: Mapping out the gender differentiation of the reading curriculum' in Pedagogy, Culture and Society Vol 7:3 507-522

SECTION 5: CLOSING REMARKS

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