Mar 4 Chapter 4

Although I am not a fan for ethnography or case study, I am always ready for trying it because it offers a different angle of doing SLA research. As is mentioned in Chapter 4 of Polio and Friedman (2017), ethnography and case study is situated within multiple overlapping social and political contexts, providing in-depth descriptions about the co-construction of knowledge and learning processes. These are “notoriously” criticized by postpositivists as lacking validity and reliability, but I personally believe that they are actually the advantages for doing ethnography and case study. The pitfalls are obvious, though: the definitions of some concepts are obscure, for instance, the demarcation of culture and community. The interpretations of qualitative results are subjective to some extent, because researchers’ own perspectives and identities should be taken into account. Generalizability is almost impossible as that being grounded in postpositivist assumptions, but I think ethnographic research has their own paths to generalizability, that is, incorporating particular studies to the wider social and political backgrounds.

To tell you the truth, the so-called “drawbacks” of ethnography and cast study are what attracts me to conduct this kind of research. If I want to apply it to my dissertation topic, the effect of chunking on L2 speech fluency (a literally cognitive-oriented topic), I would like to track the use of chunks or chunking strategies in Chinese classes in the US as well as those in China. Comparisons of learning processes and products between these two learning contexts will shed light upon the advantages for study-abroad programs, especially for the acquisition of skills that need more inductive and implicit approaches such as speech fluency.