European linguistic ethnography emerges, to a large degree, from the same North American predecessors as the linguistic anthropology of education (cf. section 2.4). However, linguistic ethnography has also been shaped by current European socio- and applied linguistics, particularly the research evolving from British universities (Copland and Creese 2015; Creese 2008; Rampton 2007a). Rampton (2007: 3) describes linguistic ethnography as an “umbrella term… wide-ranging in its empirical scope”. Following Rampton, and other linguistic ethnographers such as Copland and Creese (2015), I define linguistic ethnography as an umbrella term covering an eclectic range of interpretive approaches within the broader field of sociolinguistics, “which studies the local and immediate actions of actors from their point of view and considers how these interactions are embedded in wider social contexts and structures” (Copland and Creese 2015: 13). Thus, the most salient difference between linguistic anthropology and linguistic ethnography is the latter’s
affiliation with sociolinguistics (Creese 2008: 9; Rampton 2007a: 590-591). The following section explicates how my study draws from the eclectic linguistic ethnographic toolbox.
Rampton (2006: 24) has further developed “Goffmanian interaction analysis” by combining Goffman’s concepts of frame and face with interactional sociolinguistics, conversation analysis (CA) and micro-ethnography. Inspired by Rampton, I zoom in on the nitty-gritty interactional details of classroom talk. Interactional sociolinguistics, most basically, explores how people cue meaningful contexts in talk, how these contextualization cues are picked up by relevant others, and
how such sequences of talk influence subsequent talk. Moreover such communication invokes broader sociocultural discourse (Jaspers 2012).
Gumperz (1982: 131) promotes contextualization in relation to discourse analysis as the process through which participants in face-to-face encounters “foreground or make relevant certain aspects of background knowledge and underplay others”. As linguistic ethnographers, we look for
contextualization cues so that we can define what the participants see as relevant to the context.
According to Gumperz (1982: 131), a contextualization cue is “any feature of linguistic form that contributes to the signalling of contextual presuppositions”, such as gaze, gesture, posture,
intonation or vocal effort. As we will see, a student may apologize and demonstrate respect for the teacher by saying, “=☺sorry:☺”. S/he thereby creates a contrast between her words (sorry) and vocal signs (latched pronunciation, smiling voice and prolonged vowel). This is a common way to signal irony (see chapter five). Although I do not explicitly employ the notion of contextualization cue, it is a prerequisite for my interpretations of how participants interpret each other’s utterances and actions as signs of identities.
In order to trace how participants pick up cues, or signs of identities, the linguistic ethnographer often analyses how talk proceeds in sequences of turns (Hutchby and Wooffitt, 2001 [1998]: 47).
This analytic perspective corresponds to Madsen’s (2015) level of sequential context (section 2.4.4). A given turn, such as a teacher’s question in whole-class talk, typically invites a range of expected responses, including students uttering the correct or incorrect answers. By providing the desired second part to the teacher’s question, a student may signal that she is a smart student. The teacher can confirm that this is the desired answer, and thereby accept the suggested smart position for the student in the moment of the interaction. The teacher can also decline to acknowledge the student’s response, reject it out of hand and select someone else, or acknowledge the answer but give the student a change to provide an alternative answer that is more precise.
In this study I analyse, turn-by-turn, how Mohsen and Iman position themselves, how teachers and students respond to those two students’ turns and actions and how teachers position Iman and Mohsen relative to one another. Thus, I use linguistic ethnography as a methodological umbrella for my study, because this approach offers a useful sociolinguistic toolbox to advance the
microanalyses of classroom talk. Now let me turn to the constituent method of any ethnographic exploration: fieldwork.
3.1.2 Fieldwork
Fieldwork is the umbrella concept for the various ethnographic methods, the ethnographer can employ (Gulløv and Højlund 2003: 17), such as participant-observation, field note entries, semi-structured interviews and audio- and video-recordings of these activities. The concept of fieldwork has roots in social anthropology and builds on the basic assumption that ethnography takes place in a reflexive circle of proximity and distance (Todorov 1988). The fieldworker goes to the (often distant) field and conducts participant observation, that is; in situ observations of the unique, and (often strange), objects of study, as opposed to the research methods that can be employed at the office table, the laboratory or in the library (Hastrup 2010: 57).
It is the goal of all anthropological fieldworkers to achieve an insider perspective in order to understand the behaviour of the group being studied. Therefore s/he immerses themselves in local practices, across time spans, such as months and years, long enough to come into proximity with the unfamiliar social phenomenon in the field (Geertz 1988). Then s/he returns home to their own culture of academia, where they can analyse their data while maintaining some analytical distance to the field in study. Thus, fieldwork is conducted in a cycle of proximity and distance, both of equal importance (Todorov 1988).
Rampton (2007a: 590-591) distinguishes between the anthropological fieldworker’s endeavours of
“trying to get familiar with the strange” in an often distant field with the linguistic ethnographic fieldworker’s endeavours of “trying to get analytic distance on what’s close-at-hand” in an often recognizable field, such as a school. For someone like myself, a teacher-educator-becoming ethnographer, following more than a decade of collaboration with teachers and aspiring student-teachers, the endeavour of obtaining analytic distance to the familiar field of a primary school is indeed a relevant issue. Thus, I also use linguistic ethnography as a methodological umbrella for my study because my basic research position in the field is that of the linguistic ethnographer, rather than that of the anthropologist.
The point that remains from classic anthropology is that the fieldworker needs to, at the one hand, establish proximity to the field, as to reach a valid understanding of the focal phenomenon, in my case the construction and contestation of smartness, based on the research participants’ emic categories and perspectives, rather than apply my own pre-determined (etic) categories (e.g.
Erickson 1985: 2), and, on the other hand, establish sufficient analytic distance so as not to get carried away and uncritically report the participants perspectives. The linguistic ethnographic fine-grained analysis of face-to-face interaction helps the ethnographer to create distance to her taken-for-granted and common-sense understanding of what goes on in the school or classroom setting (Erickson 1985: 11; Jaspers 2012; Rampton 2007a: 591).
Recalling the thread of commensurability between epistemology, methodology, and theoretical framing as discussed in section 2.1, my overall constructivist stance guides me to understand empirical data as constructed, not objective. This means that my observations, field notes,
recordings, transcriptions, etc. are not pure, or “interpretation-free” data sources (Rampton 2006:
386). However, even though I as an ethnographer can contribute to the construction of data, I do not regard those data to be my speculations. I have studied a school in which teachers and students interact, understand, construct, and contest smartness in everyday academic activities. These social practices are the object of my study, and they cannot be reduced to my interpretations.
Although I adopt different strategies in order to write a reflexive research study, I cannot escape the fact that my experience, ideologies, and researcher positionality influence what I observe and contribute to shape my data selection and interpretation. However, I can greatly enhance
ethnographic validity by demonstrating awareness of, and reflecting upon, how the fieldwork and data analysis, including the subjective value of my perspective as researcher, have influenced my research findings (e.g. Erickson 1985; Gulløv and Højlund 2003; Hammersley and Atkinson 2007;
Rampton 2006: 392; Rampton, Maybin and Roberts 2015: 16). In what follows, I give such an account of my own linguistic ethnography.