Linguistic ethnographic analysis of classroom dialogue

This chapter introduces linguistic ethnography as a useful set of tools for making sense of these and related issues and explains this methodological approach, its assumptions, concepts and methods. Linguistic ethnography is an umbrella term used to describe a growing body of research, primarily in Europe, which brings together linguistic methods for studying language and discourse data with ethnographic interpretation of cultural practices. Linguistic ethnographic analyses of discourse and interaction are grounded in a number of fundamental insights about social interaction, meaning-making and the communicative order. Linguistic ethnography has been applied to numerous issues around classroom discourse and dialogue, including the implications of social processes and relationships for joint knowledge construction; and the construction of teacher and pupil identities. The chapter utilizes the analysis of the story opener’s discussion to illustrate a linguistic ethnographic approach to working with classroom interactional data. It concludes with a brief discussion of the implications of linguistic ethnographic analyses for understanding and advancing dialogic pedagogy.