English as a Lingua Franca in Higher Education / Trends in Applied Linguistics Bd.2 (PDF)

Chapter 4. An ethnographic account of the study site (p. 102-103)

4.1 Introduction

While the discourse-pragmatic analyses of the ensuing chapters rely overwhelmingly on the rich classroominteractional data, the emic data, viz. the participants’ views, opinions and evaluations, should not be underrated in their relevance, especially as they surface regularly and in different shapes: partly as stimuli that have motivated an investigative focus, partly as individual comments (referred to as ‘Quote’ in the following) supporting an interpretative finding and, finally, as the continuously present detailed insider knowledge that I have drawn on in analysing and interpreting the discourse-pragmatic data. The latter role of the emic data is clearly the most important one, but, at the same time, it lacks the open recognition and acknowledgment it would require, simply because the investigative aim of these language-focused analyses does not leave enough room for appropriately detailed descriptions of the participants’ views pertaining to the point in question. In other words, a rich as well as a thick description (cf. Davis 1995: 434) of the insider views on the Classroom Community of Practice (CCofP) in its wider context requires space on its own. This is what the present chapter will do by offering a detailed account of the Hotel Management Programme in question, or HMP for short, and especially its classroom interaction from the insiders’ points of view, based on the ethnographic data collected during the four semesters of the programme.

Such a description is thus intended to meet two aims: to render a detailed and possibly also insightful picture of the target community and classroom interaction as its main ‘practice’, and to meet the fundamental requirements of qualitative research described in the preceding chapter: credibility, dependability and transferability. As regards the

Ute Smit, University of Vienna, Austria.