ABSTRACT
Observation and ethnographic methods in applied linguistics draw on their disciplinary roots in anthropology. Close observations of children’s language use and development was pioneered by language socialization researchers trained in linguistic anthropology. The documentation of naturally occurring social interaction is a hallmark of ethnographic observations. In classroom and educational settings for multilingual learners, the focus of observation research is often on describing in close detail the interactional patterns that promote or constrain children’s participation in classroom talk. Most contemporary research using this methodology is qualitative, relying on audio and video transcriptions, though quantitively oriented observation schemes are sometimes used. Hence the focus of ethnographic and observational studies of young L2 learners is often less on particular linguistic gains that children make and more on the dimensions of the social processes that facilitate or hamper children’s language acquisition.
