The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Ethnography

Karin Tusting

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138938168
• eBook ISBN: 9781317383321
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Ethnography provides an accessible, authoritative and comprehensive overview of this growing body of research, combining ethnographic approaches with close attention to language use. This handbook illustrates the richness and potential of linguistic ethnography to provide detailed understandings of situated patterns of language use while connecting these patterns clearly to broader social structures.

Including a general introduction to linguistic ethnography and 25 state-of-the-art chapters from expert international scholars, the handbook is divided into three sections. Chapters cover historical, empirical, methodological and theoretical contributions to the field, and new approaches and developments.

This handbook is key reading for those studying linguistic ethnography, qualitative research methods, sociolinguistics and educational linguistics within English Language, Applied Linguistics, Education and Anthropology.

1

General introduction

Karin Tusting

Linguistic ethnography is a term that has come into increasing prominence within applied and sociolinguistics in the past 20 years. It refers to an approach which combines theoretical and methodological approaches from linguistics and from ethnography, to research social questions which in some way involve language. Linguistics affords sensitive attention to language, and a large and historically well-developed toolbox of specific analytic approaches which can provide precise accounts of meaning-making processes as they happen. Ethnography adds reflexivity about the role of the researcher; attention to people’s emic perspectives; sensitivity to in-depth understandings of particular settings; and openness to complexity, contradiction and re-interpretation over time (Rampton et al., 2004).

The term does not represent a fixed and bounded disciplinary area. Rather, it indexes a growing body of work from researchers who share this commitment to combining ethnographic approaches to research with close attention to language use. Therefore, there is some debate as to what linguistic ethnography should be called – a field, a sub-discipline, an ‘umbrella’ or a methodological approach. It can be thought of primarily as a community of scholars who share particular theoretical and methodological orientations towards researching language in social life. This handbook serves as one representation of the research and thinking of this dynamic and growing community.

History of linguistic ethnography

The community can be traced back to an initial seminar in Leicester in 2001 which brought together 30 researchers who shared an interest in bringing together linguistics and ethnography. Several of those present at that seminar (including Rampton, Creese, Slembrouck, Papen and myself) are represented in this volume. The meeting was funded by the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) and Cambridge University Press, and many scholars present were members of BAAL. The seminar aimed to provide a space for people approaching research from an ethnographic perspective to come together to share their work and discuss the extent of their orientation towards shared theoretical and methodological concerns, and to try to identify the particular features which characterised linguistic ethnography in the UK.

The principal goal of that meeting was to start a debate around key issues (see Barton et al., 2001 for a report), and many of the issues first raised at that seminar have continued to be discussed within the community. Topics which were first raised there which are represented in this handbook include literacy studies, multilingual classrooms, working with field notes and with transcripts of interaction, reflexivity, power relations in research and collaborative ethnography. The meeting ended, though, without a clear consensus as to what the field concretely consisted of or even what it should be called. At that point, it was still unclear whether this would turn out to be a viable grouping of researchers. We decided to keep communicating with one another, starting off with some quite modest goals: to create an email list to enable continued communication between people carrying out research from this perspective; to explore whether some more formal group could be set up, perhaps as part of BAAL; and to try to arrange at least one more meeting to continue the conversation.

Seventeen years later, at the time of writing there are over 1,100 subscribers to the electronic mailing list of the Linguistic Ethnography Forum (LEF). LEF was set up as BAAL’s first Special Interest Group (SIG; there are currently 13 SIGs, in a wide range of areas, from Corpus Linguistics to Language in Africa). In addition to regular colloquia and strands at the BAAL Annual Meeting, the SIG supports regular smaller meetings and workshops in the UK and Europe. The group’s biennial conference, started by Fiona Copland, Julia Snell and Sara Shaw, Explorations in Ethnography, Language and Communication, has been held seven times so far and attracts participants from around the world. Training programmes for doctoral researchers are held regularly at King’s College London (Key Concepts and Methods in Ethnography, Language and Communication), and the MOSAIC Centre for Research on Bilingualism at the University of Birmingham ran a three-year project Researching Multilingualism in Research Practice which included training in researching multilingual settings from a linguistic ethnographic perspective.

Work which identifies as linguistic ethnography is published in many applied linguistics and discourse journals, and two influential series of Working Papers (Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies, King’s College London; Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, Babylon Centre for the Study of Superdiversity, Tilburg University) provide important spaces for researchers to connect with each other, publish works-in-progress and develop shared ideas. Books and special issues have consolidated the field and its methodology (Rampton et al., 2007; Copland & Creese, 2015; Snell et al., 2015). Our initial hunch in 2001 that this might be a conversation worth pursuing proves to have been well justified.

Theoretical influences and antecedents

Linguistic ethnography draws from a range of established theoretical areas, some of which have been explored in more detail in chapters in this handbook. Rampton et al. (2004), in a position paper which attempted to define the then state of the art in linguistic ethnography, identified five traditions which informed the development of linguistic ethnography in the UK: interactional sociolinguistics, literacy studies, critical discourse analysis, neo-Vygotskian research on language and learning, and interpretive applied linguistics for language teaching.

From the 1960s onwards, interactional sociolinguistics has argued for the importance of researching language in use and has developed analytic approaches providing insight into the dynamics of interaction (Rampton, this volume). The work of contemporary interactional sociolinguists has demonstrated the value of ethnography for understanding language change, for discerning the connections between language change and social change, and for understanding how close analysis of interactional data can provide insight into how people use language to index social identities (see, for instance, Eckert, 2000, 2012 for a discussion of the historical development of sociolinguistics as a field, from more quantitative variationist perspectives to more ethnographically influenced interactional approaches).

Literacy studies have developed a strong tradition of ethnographic research and a practice conceptualisation of literacy and language, which have both played a role in the development of linguistic ethnography (see Tusting, 2013; Gillen & Ho, this volume). Critical discourse analysis also approaches language as social practice and draws on social theory to provide a critical orientation to the role of discourse in perpetuating patterns of social inequality (Slembrouck, this volume). Sociocultural neo-Vygotskian approaches to language and learning highlighted the importance of social interaction for learning and the value of detailed analysis of those interactions at the micro-level, and the tradition of interpretive applied linguistics for language teaching brought Hymes’s notion of ‘communicative competence’ to the centre of the pedagogical process. (See Rampton et al., 2004 for further exploration.) Much of the early work identifying as linguistic ethnography can be traced back to roots in one of these traditions.

Other areas of research have had a more distant, but still important influence. For instance, there have to date been surprisingly few direct research connections between linguistic anthropology, as practised particularly in the US, and the linguistic ethnography community as it has developed within applied linguistics and sociolinguistics in Britain and Europe. Rampton et al. (2004, p. 13) identified linguistic anthropology not as a theoretical antecedent but as a “very important reference point”, and this is still an appropriate way to describe the relationship between the areas.

Historically, linguistic anthropology in the US developed from the work of scholars like Boas and Sapir studying indigenous Native American groups, recording their languages and studying their cultures. This ‘first paradigm’ of linguistic anthropology (Duranti, 2003), while of great historical and cultural relevance, has not, for the most part, been a direct influence on the development of linguistic ethnography. In contrast, Hymes’s ‘ethnography of speaking’ approach, developed in the 1960s (Hymes, 1962), and his work with Gumperz building on this (Gumperz & Hymes, 1972) have indeed been key (Rampton et al., 2007; Rampton, this volume). Duranti (2003) identifies Hymes’s and Gumperz’ work as foundational to a ‘second paradigm’ of linguistic anthropology, reacting against then-dominant structural and cognitive perspectives in linguistics, which highlighted the need to study language-in-use situated in social and cultural contexts, rather than studying language as an abstract system. Building on this work, but also influenced by post-structuralist and post-modern perspectives from the 1980s onwards, Duranti describes a ‘third paradigm’ of linguistic anthropology, interested particularly in the role of language in the construction of identities, narratives and ideologies, connecting the micro-level of interaction with the macro-level of culture and society, a focus which is indeed consonant with much linguistic ethnographic work, as the chapters in this handbook demonstrate. (See Maybin & Tusting, 2011 for further discussion of the relationship between these two fields.)

Despite the lack of explicit research connections, the conceptual influence of linguistic anthropology is clear in providing many of the concepts which have come to be frequently drawn on in linguistic ethnography. Some of the key ideas which run through the chapters in this handbook, such as indexicality (Silverstein & Urban, 1996), performance (Bauman & Briggs, 1990), language socialisation (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986) and enregisterment (Agha, 2005), have emerged from linguistic anthropology. The work of sociocultural linguists in the US, such as Bucholtz and Hall (2005) on adopting a sociocultural approach to identity and interaction, is located within the linguistic anthropological tradition and has, in turn, informed linguistic ethnography. And research which can be located within the linguistic anthropology of education (Wortham & Rymes, 2003) has been an important influence, including Erickson’s micro-interactional work (Erickson, 2004), Wortham’s focus on identity development through language use in educational settings (Wortham, 2006) and Rymes’s work on communicative repertoires in diverse classroom settings (Rymes, 2014).

One area of research in linguistic ethnography which does trace its origin more explicitly back to linguistic anthropology is ethnographic research on multilingualism. Represented recently in the UK particularly by the MOSAIC Centre for Research on Multilingualism at the University of Birmingham, work adopting this perspective emerged from the late 1980s onwards. Martin-Jones and Martin’s (2017) account of the history of this area shows clearly how work in this field emerged from the same theoretical roots as linguistic ethnography more generally, particularly the work of Gumperz and Hymes mentioned above. They also show how important works by Gal (1989), Heller (1999) and Woolard (1989), all linguistic anthropologists, developed a critical approach to ethnographic sociolinguistics which opened up space for an array of ethnographic work in multilingual contexts, including classroom education (Heller & Martin-Jones, 2001), complementary schools (Blackledge & Creese, 2010) and multilingual literacy practices (Martin-Jones & Jones, 2000). Martin-Jones and Gardner (2012, p. 1) describe the current emergence of a “new sociolinguistics of multilingualism”, informed by an epistemological shift to a critical and ethnographic approach, and by increased concern with globalisation, transnational mobilities and changing patterns of communication. Such ethnographic studies of multilingualism have played a central role in the development of linguistic ethnography and have contributed significantly to contemporary theoretical concerns of linguistics more generally: for example, the development of the theory of translanguaging in contexts of superdiversity (Creese et al., 2017; Li Wei, 2018).

The handbook

The purpose of this handbook is to provide an overview of the current state of linguistic ethnography, particularly for those relatively new to this area, written by key scholars who locate their work within this community, providing enough information and references to support researchers early in their career to develop their own work from a linguistic ethnographic perspective, with many illustrative examples being drawn from the writers’ own research in the area.

This purpose is reflected in the structure of the book. It is divided into three sections. The first, Antecedents, Related Areas and Key Concepts, outlines important traditions of research and ideas which have been closely connected with the development of linguistic ethnography. Rampton describes the influence of interactional sociolinguistics, particularly the work of Gumperz and Hymes in developing the ethnography of communication, reflecting especially on how Gumperzian interactional sociolinguistics has shaped linguistic ethnography and how this can be built on in training current researchers and in developing future research projects. Slembrouck outlines the range of different understandings of ‘discourse analysis’ which have developed and how these connect to and inform linguistic ethnography. Gillen and Ho explore the continuing connections between literacy studies and linguistic ethnography. An interest in issues of global mobility and superdiversity has been a key theme in much recent work in linguistic ethnography, and Grey and Piller explore this in their chapter on sociolinguistic ethnographies of globalisation.

Slembrouck and Vandenbroucke address the related notion of scale, arguing that an increased focus on scale across the social sciences can be interpreted as part of a broader ‘spatial turn’. Drawing on data from marriage fraud investigations in the context of immigration, they show how an ethnographic focus on documents, interaction and the site of the body can be interpreted within multiple scales, with the national and international being instantiated in these local interactions. Snell focusses on the concept of social class, first showing how static notions of class were important as explanatory factors in Labovian variationist sociolinguistics before demonstrating, partly with reference to her own research with elementary school children, how ethnographic observation combined with intensive language analysis can provide insights into the subtleties of how class is oriented to and performed through everyday language use.

Blackledge and Creese present the Bakhtinian notion of heteroglossia, a concept which captures the multivoiced nature of language situations, illustrating this with examples from their own recent research on translanguaging in contemporary urban settings. Jaspers and Van Hoof deal with the related concepts of style and stylisation, surveying the importance of the concept of style in sociolinguistics before showing how ethnographic studies of real-life language use have used stylisation to describe speakers playing with different styles to construct social meanings and engage in different kinds of identity performances. Finally, Bezemer and Abdullahi explore connections between linguistic ethnography and the emerging field of multimodality research.

While the above chapters draw out methodological implications of the theoretical concepts, the second section of the handbook focusses more directly on methods. It opens with Papen’s chapter on participant-observation and field notes, the method of data collection which could be said to most centrally define ethnography as an approach. She first explores the historical development of participant-observation, before providing more explanation of how participant-observation can play out and how field notes can be drawn on in linguistic ethnographic projects, illustrating these points with reference to her own research in classrooms. De Fina then considers the place of interviews in ethnographic research, comparing the ethnographic interview to other kinds of interviews used in social sciences and addressing critical issues including the role of the interviewer and the relationship between interviewer and research participants.

One characteristic of much linguistic ethnography is close...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• 1 General introduction
• History of linguistic ethnography
• Theoretical influences and antecedents
• The handbook
• References
• Part I Antecedents, related areas and key concepts
• 2 Interactional sociolinguistics
• Introduction
• Historical background
• Approach to analysis
• Challenges
• Practical interventions beyond the academy
• Current contributions and research areas
• Future directions
• Further reading
• Related topics
• References
• 3 Discourse analysis
• Historical perspectives and key definitions: defining discourse and the discursive
• Current contributions: the contemporary range of discourse analytical engagements
• Critical issues and debates: discourse analysis and linguistic ethnography
• Research methods and future directions: recording, transcription and the relationship with fieldwork
• Further reading
• Related topics
• References
• 4 Literacy studies
• Introduction and definitions
• Historical perspectives
• Critical issues and debates
• Current contributions and research areas
• Main research methods including approaches to analysis
• Implications for practice
• Future directions
• Further reading
• Related topics
• References
• 5 Sociolinguistic ethnographies of globalisation
• Introduction and definitions
• Historical perspectives
• Critical issues and debates
• Current contributions and research areas
• Future directions
• Further reading
• Related topics
• References
• 6 Scale
• Introduction – the history and scope of the concept of scale as Part of a spatial turn
• Scale as space/time
• The body as a taken-for-granted scale
• Scales in linguistic ethnography: informants, practices and research
• Scale in a linguistic ethnographic account of border-crossing
• Future directions
• Further reading
• Related topics
• References
• 7 Social class
• Introduction
• Historical perspectives: the emergence of class in variationist sociolinguistics
• Main research methods
• Current contributions and research areas
• Critical debates and implications for practice
• Future directions
• Summary
• Further reading
• Related topics
• References
• 8 Heteroglossia
• Introduction
• Historical perspectives
• Critical issues and debates
• Current and recent research
• Implications
• Future directions
• Further reading
• Related topics
• References
• 9 Style and stylisation
• Introduction
• Historical perspectives
• Current contributions and research areas
• Critical issues and debates
• Main research methods, including approaches to analysis
• Future directions
• Further reading
• Related topics
• References
• 10 Multimodality
• Introduction
• Historical perspectives
• Critical issues and debates
• Current contributions and research areas
• Main research methods: looking beyond writing
• Main research methods: looking beyond speech
• Further directions
• Further reading
• Related topics
• References
• Part II Methods
• 11 Participant observation and field notes
• Introduction and definitions
• Historical perspectives
• Methods
• Current contributions and research areas
• Critical issues and debates
• Future directions
• Further reading
• Related topics
• References
• 12 The ethnographic interview
• Introduction
• Types of interviews
• Historical perspectives
• Critical issues and debates
• Current contributions and research areas
• Conclusions and future directions
• Further reading
• Related topics
• References
• 13 Micro-analysis of spoken interaction
• Introduction and definitions
• Historical perspectives
• Key debates
• Main research methods and analysis
• Implications for practice
• Current contributions
• Future directions
• Further reading
• Related topics
• References
• 14 Ethics
• Introduction
• Historical perspectives
• Critical issues and debates
• Current contributions and research areas
• Future directions
• Conclusion
• Further reading
• Related topics
• References
• 15 Collaborative ethnography
• Introduction and definitions
• Historical perspectives
• Critical issues and debates
• Current contributions and research areas
• Main research methods
• Implications for practice
• Future directions
• Further reading
• Related topics
• References
• 16 Reflexivity
• Introduction and definitions
• Historical perspectives
• Critical issues and debates
• Current contributions and research areas
• Implications for practice: the backstage of our research
• Future directions
• Further reading
• Related topics
• References
• 17 Digital approaches in linguistic ethnography
• Introduction
• Historical perspectives
• Critical issues and debates
• Current contributions and research areas
• Main research methods
• Future directions
• Further reading
• Related topics
• References
• 18 Mixing methods? Linguistic ethnography and language variation
• Introduction
• Critical debates: how compatible are ethnographic and variationist traditions?
• Current contributions and key concepts: recent studies using ‘mixed-methods’
• Main research methods and analysis: mutually useful data collection, transcription and analytic categories?
• Implications for practice: mixed methods? Lessons learned
• Acknowledgements
• Related topics
• References
• Part III Sites and situations
• 19 Youth language
• Introduction: definitions and key terms
• Historical perspectives
• Critical issues and debates
• Current research areas
• Future directions
• Further reading
• Related topics
• References
• 20 Language diversity in classroom settings
• Historical perspectives
• Current contributions and research areas
• Critical issues and debates
• Discussion, conclusions and further directions
• Further reading
• Related topics
• References
• 21 Elite multilingualism
• Introduction
• Historical perspectives
• Critical issues and debates
• Current contributions and research areas
• Implications for practice
• Future directions
• Further reading
• Related topics
• References
• 22 Lingua franca scenarios
• Introduction and key concepts
• Historical perspectives
• Critical issues and debates
• Current research areas
• Main research methods and approaches to analysis
• Implications for practice
• Future directions
• Acknowledgements
• Further reading
• Related topics
• References
• 23 Faith communities
• Introduction
• Historical perspectives
• Critical issues and debates
• Main research methods
• Implications for practice
• Future directions
• Further reading
• Related topics
• References
• 24 Policy
• Introduction
• Historical perspectives, critical issues and debates
• Current contributions and research areas
• Main research methods
• Implications for practice
• Future directions
• Further reading
• Related topics
• References
• 25 Sign languages
• Introduction: linguistic ethnography and sign languages
• Main research methods
• Terms and classifications: sociolinguistic contexts of signing
• Research areas
• Critical issues and debates: language ideologies
• Future directions
• Conclusion: contributions and implications
• Acknowledgements
• Further readings
• Related topics
• References
• 26 Academic writing
• Introduction
• Historical perspectives and core influences
• Main research methods
• Current contributions and research areas
• Critical issues and debates
• Implications for practice
• Future directions
• Further reading
• Related topics
• References
• Index