The ethnography of communication Sociolinguistics Sara Pacheco Source: Saville-Troike,M. (1996) in S.L. McKay and N. Hornberger (Eds.) (1996) Chapter 11: The ethnography of communication.

The ethnography of communication Basic terms, concepts and issues Patterns and functions of communication Speech community Language and culture Communicative competence Linguistic knowledge Interaction skills Cultural knowledge Doing the ethnography of communication Units of analysis The act of analysis Findings and applications to language learning and teaching

Basic terms, concepts and issues The ethnography of communication Basic terms, concepts and issues Patterns and functions of communication The relationship of language form and use to patterns and functions Rules for appropriate language use in specific contexts An ethnography of communication approach typically, tough not exclusively, looks for strategies and conventions governing larger units of communication and involves more holistic interpretation. |Ethnometodology Societal level Societal level Categories of talk Attitudes about languages and their speakers The use of rules to affect social and cultural outcomes Anthropology Linguistics Descriptive Prescriptive Expectations Language function Regular patterns and constraints Creating and reinforcing boundaries which unify member s of one speech community while excluding outsiders from intragroup communication

Basic terms, concepts and issues The ethnography of communication Basic terms, concepts and issues Speech community Not homogeneous  communicative repertoire Codes (different languages or significantly languages varieties) Speaker’s choice Styles (varieties associated with sociocultural dimensions: age, sex…) Registers (varieties associated with settings or scenes) Being a member of a speech community has been defined as sharing the same language (Lyons, 1970), sharing rules of speaking and interpretation of speech performance (Hymes, 1972), and sharing sociocultural understandings and presuppositions with regard to speech (Sherzer, 1975). Some bilinguals change not only code but rules of speaking, non-verbal behaviors and other strategies for interaction Native speakers learn at some point a schooled variety of their language and learn when to use it. L2 learners differs from FL learners when acquiring rules of communication as they are in a process of acculturation. Speaking the same language is sufficient for some degree of participation but perhaps not for full membership.

Basic terms, concepts and issues The ethnography of communication Basic terms, concepts and issues Language and culture Development of general theories of communication Description and analysis of communication within specific speech communities. The grammar of a language may reveal the way time and space are organized, convey beliefs about animacy and the relative power of beings, and imply a great deal of other information by conventional presupposition. Vocabulary index of the way the speakers categorize experience Many words do not mean the same thing as their translation equivalents in other languages. Part of the potential application of the ethnography of communication to language teaching comes in understanding the nature and content of the language-culture relationship in both the specific contexts of communication in which students are likely to want or need to participate and their contexts of learning — and in determining what aspects of culture need to be, can be, and should be taught.

Basic terms, concepts and issues The ethnography of communication Basic terms, concepts and issues Communicative competence Language code + What to say + Linguistic knowledge Interaction skills Cultural knowledge How to say it appropriately in any given situation The ability to discriminate between variants which carry social meaning by serving as markers of social categories and those which are socially insignificant and the knowledge of what the social meaning of a variant is in a particular situation. (Foreign talk) Social conventions which regulate the use of language and other communicative devices in particular settings. Language as it occurs in its social context  an emergent and dynamic process. Total set of knowledge and skills which speakers bring into a situation. No topic is universally forbidden; linguistic taboos relate integrally to culture. Shared knowledge explains shared presuppositions and judgments of truth value undergirdings of language structures and contextually appropriate usage and Interpretation

Doing the ethnography of communication Unit of analysis The communicative situation The communicative event The communicative act Observing Asking questions Participating in group activities Testing validity against intuition No anticipation Cross-cultural knowledge and comparison Naturalistics settings The context within which communication occurs. (a church service, a trial, a class in school…). A single situation maintains a consistent general configuration of activities and the same overall ecology, although there may be great diversity in the kinds of interaction. An unified set of components: beginning with the same general purpose, the same general topic, and the same participants, generally using the same language variety, maintaining the same tone or key, and using the same rules for interaction, in the same setting. It is generally coterminous with a single interactional function, such as a referential statement, a request, or a command, and may be either verbal or nonverbal.

Description  static   dynamic  process The ethnography of communication Doing the ethnography of communication The act of analysis Description  static   dynamic  process Analyzing communication does ultimately require inferences to be made about the intentions and effects of interactions, although such inferences should be grounded wherever possible in an understanding of the perceptions of those who are participants in an event. A final characterization that can be made of most ethnographic research in classrooms is that it is open to new questions that may arise in the course of data collection and analysis and that it attempts to account for the full range of communicative phenomena which occur in the social context of interaction.

Findings and applications to language learning and teaching The ethnography of communication Findings and applications to language learning and teaching The methods of the ethnography of communication can be profitably applied by teachers in observing and analyzing the situation in their own classroom and in heightening their awareness of their own interaction patterns with students For Hymes, research and application involve a two-way sharing of knowledge - the investigator contributing scientific modes of inquiry and participants providing the requisite knowledge and perspective of the particular community contexts. Knowledge of the ways in which communicative structures and strategies differ across cultures will help teachers better understand the reasons for students' deviations from standard and native language norms. Understanding why students might make certain choices in language use can lead to more tolerant and appreciative attitudes toward students' full range of communicative resources. Heath goes beyond description to suggest ways in which educators can make use of knowledge from the ethnographies of communication to build bridges between communities and schools and develop ways to accommodate group differences in language and culture.