ABSTRACT
This chapter applies discourse analysis beyond the speech event to ethnographic data—face-to-face participant observation with living people in context. It analyzes a pathway of speech events that took place in one high school classroom across an academic year. The chapter examines classroom data across a year, from the Asian American supplementary school. It shows how teachers and students in one classroom deployed nicknames in ways that accomplished social action, and explores examples from ethnographic discourse analyses. Ethnography involves at least three data sources: fieldnotes and/or recordings drawn from participant observation, interviews, and documents. The chapter also analyzes recordings of naturally occurring events, interview transcripts, and/or documents in order to understand how groups of people make sense of their experiences in one or a few settings. Discourse analysis of ethnographic data typically focuses on relatively local, shorter-term processes.
