1. 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.

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.