ABSTRACT
Ethnographic methods, including participant observation, ethnographic interviews, and digital ethnography, are commonly used in research within anthropology, education, and other social sciences to investigate questions relating to the communicative competence of second language learners. These methods are also commonly integrated into research on language learners within the variationist sociolinguistic tradition, in which data is subject to both quantitative and qualitative analysis. This chapter outlines the historical context of ethnography and related sociolinguistic methods and summarizes how research using these approaches has shaped scholars’ understanding of communicative competence. In addition to providing insights into learners’ experiences and outcomes in a variety of settings, this work has also problematized the notion of communicative competence as an aim for learners by highlighting the multiple ways in which learners may use language to index their identities, ambiguity in community norms, and the ideological construction of classifications such as second language learner.
