fieldwory interpretation

Fieldwork Interpretation
Ethnographers are concerned that they understand the meaningfulness of communication from the vantage point of the participants who produce that communication. Participant ideas about who they are, what they are doing, how they feel about who they are and what they are doing, and how they relate with their natural and social worlds, this and more becomes an essential part of ethnographic inquiry. Being able to argue that you know something about this “participant view” is one essential objective of ethnography.

1.Select some pattern of communication that was active in the speech community you observed. Describe it! Provide examples from your data that show that the pattern exists. Use the Hymes SPEAKING mnemonic to help you create these descriptions.

2.State how there is facework, speech acts, cultural terms for talk, address terms, norms and rules, narrative, or a relational dialectic that gives meaning to the communication practiced by participants. Do not emphasize why this is important to YOU, or what YOU think this means. At this point, you should be giving attention to what the participants think is happening, why it is happening, and/or why it is important and/or meaningful that it is happening that way. Yes, you can use quotes from your interview and fieldwork data. You can also add to this by summarizing participant quotations.

Essay requirements:

Typed, double spaced, 12-point font; page length will vary based on how lengthy your fieldnotes are. Typically the paper runs 10-15pages.