ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the Community of Practice (CofP) model in some detail while setting up the central thesis of this book, principally that researchers need to carefully verify that a given social aggregate in a research site is indeed a community of practice or alternatively something different. The latter part of the chapter explores how this is most reliably done, by using data analysis to examine the language-driven aspects of the formation of a classroom-based community of practice. Emphasis is placed on the ways that researchers can most reliably verify the status of observed practices through ethnographic participation. Representative features are identified and their emergence traced via analysis of ethnographic field notes and audio recordings. Ways of doing, grounded in this community, are verified as being distinct from more widely recognisable practices. Identifying the difference increases the likelihood that results of discourse analysis can become relevant beyond a single study.
