Using ethnography in the analysis of pedagogical practice: Perspectives from activity theory

The linguistic and discursive turn in classroom and pedagogical research can be said to have arrived in the mid-1970s to the 1980s when educational researchers started to focus on analysing the fi ne details of interactions in the classroom. Instead of following the experimental research paradigm, this line of research generally follows the interpretive research paradigm (see Lin 1998 for a delineation of the different research paradigms infl uencing classroom research) and draws on tools from interactional sociolinguistics and discourse analysis.