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

Aias I 12

Vhlle traditional ethnography aimed at giving a full decription of
social units to provide a general understanding of how they function,
Iaicroethnography seeks to give a description of a particular type of
Interaction defined Ъу specific settings ( classroom interaction, adult-
child communication at home, patient-therapist dialogues, etc.). Vhile the
method of traditional ethnography prescribed observation by total
Immersion in the observed culture, original data not being accessible or
replicable, microethnography Involves systematic data collection through
recording, data being available for re-examination. In a more recent
development, experimental ethnography,'... natural events are triggered
automatically through the experimental creation of specific contexts'.
(Trueba and Vright,1981:149).

If '... a discipline is defined not by what it studies but by the questions
it seeks to answer' (Halliday,1985:6), the main question ethnographers
pose is

what people need to know in order to do what they do In ordinary
social interaction. They emphasize not simply behaviour but the
knowledge necessary to produce that behaviour. (Hrickson,1981:29)

It comes as no surprise, then, that naturalistic studies end up revealing
'disadvantaged* children's linguistic competence and mothers' adequate
language input, while experimental studies tend to stress the opposite
(Veils,1981; Tizard,1984): the more we study children's talk, the better
speakers we discover them to be. Another consequence Is that members of
the community under investigation are more than a mere source of data, as
they may provide insights into the patterns and meaning of observed
social interaction.

So much of an ethnographic approach consists in turning into explicit
knowledge what is implicit, taken-for-granted knowledge about the way
people act, in an effort to ^,understand the conventions and unpack the
ideology' (Street,1984ι40). Comparative knowledge of other conventions and
ideologies is necessary for the identification and interpretation of
patterns, but in situations where different cultural groups exist and/or
society is undergoing a process of rapid soclo-economical change (as in

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