Ethnography and Language Education

Abstract

The term ethnography refers both to a set of research methods and to the written report of information obtained by these methods. Originat-ing in the discipline of anthropology, ethnographic methods include participant observation, face-to-face interviewing, researcher reflection/ journaling, and analysis of archival records (Eisenhart, 2001). Ethnogra-phy as a written genre is aimed at describing and understanding the cultural practices and perspectives of groups of people. Appro-priating ethnography from anthropology in the 1970s or thereabouts, educational ethnographers were hopeful that ethnographic research methods might illuminate aspects of educational practice that were difficult to see in quantitative descriptions of learning and teaching activities. They were (and are) further hopeful that specific situated descriptions of the varieties of ways people organize their cultural and educational practices would prove helpful in improving schooling at all levels. Ethnographic language education researchers attempt to understand learners' and teachers' perspectives on how languages are taught and learned in local as well as larger societal contexts. After briefly examining the disciplinary history of the approach, focus in this chapter is on contemporary (1995–2005) ethnographic contributions to our understandings of language education. The chapter concludes with a discussion of problems with the research method and of future poten-tial directions for research. Franz Boas, one of the pioneers of North American anthropology and an eloquent advocate for anthropological fieldwork, argued at the end of the 1800s that understanding human culture and development could only be approached after systematic descriptions and analyses of the diverse means people used to organize their cultures. The necessity to produce descriptions and explanations of cultures, that is, to do and to produce ethnographies, began to be seen as urgent in the late nineteenth