Discourse Patterns in First Language Use at Hcme and Second Language Learning at School: an Ethnographic Approach

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1.2 The ethnographic approach

The study is based on the assumption that an ethnographic approach is
advisable because :

- it makes teachers aware that children's language skills have to be
considered in a broader framework of culturally acquired
communicative competence, which is already developed and should not
he ignored;

- it enables teachers to build on children's strengths, for example, by
using in the classroom familiar patterns of language for the
development of communicative competence;

- it fits in with ideological positions and economic realities in
underdeveloped <1> countries, recognizing human rather than technolo-
gical resources as their main asset in the struggle for development;

- it fosters a positive attitude towards studies based on local reality
versus application of strategies devised in non-comparable settings
(i.e. rich countries).

The growing Interest in naturalistic and qualitative research in education
may be due to dissatisfaction with the experimental methods and the
impossibility of 'culture-free' tests (Cole,1985b), or to a reaction
against ethnocentric claims to universality, or simply to the availability
of new audio or video-tape based analytical techniques coupled with
enlarged computing facilities. The ethnographic approach cuts across
different disciplines and forms new areas of investigation (ethnography
of communication, of classroom interaction, of learning situations etc.),
the common underlying assumption being that the context of social
interaction is a crucial factor for learning.

(1) The term is used in the sense of 'having been underdeveloped,
crippled in their development' (Rodney,1972).

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