“ETHNOGRAPHY”

Group 11:
-Annisa Krismadayanti (17018116)
-Hanifa Medya (17018130)
-Lia Utami (17018012)

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 Definition Ethnography
One broad approach to researching the rules, cultural norms, and
values that are intertwined with language use is ethnography.
Ethnographies are based on first hand observations of behavior in a
group of people in their natural setting. Duranti (1997, 85) says, „an ethnography
is the written description of the social organization, social activities, symbolic
and material resources, and interpretive practices characteristic of a particular
group of people

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 Varieties of talk
• Marshall (1961)
Marshall (1961) has indicated how the !Kung, a bush-dwelling people
of South West Africa, have certain customs which help them either to avoid or
to reduce friction and hostility within bands and between bands.
• Basso (1972)
The Western Apache view of silence (Basso, 1972) the !Kung speak to
prevent uncertainty in human relationships, the Western Apache of east-central
Arizona choose to be silent when there is a strong possibility that such uncertainty
exists

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 Definition Ethnomethodology
• Branch of sociology which is concerned in the processes and techniques that
people use to interpret the world around them and to interact with that world
• We understand others because we share certain background assumptions with them
E.g. The baby cried. The mommy picked it up.≠ The baby cried. The adult picked it up.
-Sacks: membership categorization devices which allow us to assign certain meanings
to words
• Ethnomethodologists adopt what is called a phenomenological view of the world – the
world is something that people must constantly keep creating and sustaining for
themselves with the help of language. Ethnomethodologists regard „meaning‟ and
„meaningful activity‟ as something people accomplish when they interact socially.
• Commonsense knowledge and practical reasoning: the understanding, maxims and
definitions that we employ in daily living as we go about doing things (experience &
practical reasoning)

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 Ethnomethodology
• The aim of ethnomethodology is to study the processes of sense making
(idealizing and formulizing) that members of society use to construct the
social world and its factual properties (its sense of being ready-made and
independent of perception)

• Ethnomethodologists are interested in such matters as how people interact,

solve common problems, maintain social contacts, perform routine activities,
and show that they know what is going on around them and communicate
that knowledge to others.

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Relationship between Ethnography & Ethnomethodology
Ethnography is the study of people‟s shared social relations and cultural
construction, the way they build and understand their world. Ethnomethodology is a method
that can be used when undertaking ethnography. It is an approach to understanding culture
through an analysis of the way people use the language to divide up and make sense of
their world. Ethnomethodologist look at how everyday conversation, utterances, and
gestures help construct their world.
Example of ethnomethodology:
Recording how homeless people in a large city talk about the pros and cons of different
places to crash for the night.

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 ETHNOGRAPHY OF COMMUNICATION
• The ethnography of communication was proposed by D.H. Hymes in the early
1960s.
• The ethnography of communication is an approach to discourse that is based on
anthropology and linguistics. Not only does it focus upon a wider range of
communicative behaviours than the other approaches, but built into its theory and
methodology is an intentional openness to discovery of the variety of forms and
functions available for communication, and to the way such forms and functions
are part of different ways of life.
• The goal of ethnography of communication is to study the communicative
competence of a specific speech community by discovering and analyzing patterns
of communication that organize the use of language in particular communicative
activities.
• The ethnography of communication examines speech events within the social
context in which they occur, and in particular, examines patterns of language
use in specific groups, communities, institutions, and societies.
• The aim of the ethnography of communication is to explore the means of
speaking available to members of a particular community. This includes the
examination of formal, informal and ritual events within a particular group of
speakers. It explores language use in particular social and cultural settings,
drawing together both anthropological and linguistic views on communication.
This examination also includes the varieties of language used within the
community as well as the speech acts and genres available to the members of
the community.

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 COMMUNICATIVE UNITS
Hymes (1974:65) describes three units which can be identified to analyze
communicative activities as follows:
1. The communicative situation, the context in which the communicative activity
occurs. Typically, terms exist in the language by which to label situation, such as: a
church, classroom, etc.
Vestibulum
congue
2. The communicative event, an event which has the same components throughout,
such as: the same general purpose, setting, topic, participants, language variety,
tone, and rules for interaction.
3. The communicative acts or „stages‟ within the communicative event. The
communicative act is generally coterminous with a single interactional function,
such as: a referential statement, a request, or a command, and may be either
verbal or non verbal.

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 • Language and culture
Development of general theories of communication
Description and analysis of communication within specific speech communities.
The grammar of a language may
Vocabulary index of the Many words do not mean the reveal the way time and space
way the speakers same thing as their translation are organized, convey beliefs
categorize experience equivalents in other languages. about animacy and the relative
power of beings, and imply a
great deal of other information
by conventional presupposition.

Part of the potential application of the ethnography of communication to language teaching

comes in understanding the nature and content of the language-culture relationship in both
the specific contexts of communication in which students are likely to want or need to
participate and their contexts of learning — and in determining what aspects of culture need
to be, can be, and should be taught.

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 HYMES’ SPEAKING GRIDS
• “Hymes creates a framework which is intended to be used to look at any
naturally occurring speech to discover the rules for speaking (modes of
speaking, topics, message forms within particular settings and activities).”
(Hymes, 1972a, b:55-57)

• Hymes uses the word SPEAKING as an acronym for the various factors that
he deems to be relevant.

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 Hymes 1974: ethnographic framework (factors involved in
speaking)
S – Setting and Scene
P – Participants
E – Ends
A – Act sequence
K – Key
I – Instrumentalities
N – Norms of Interaction and Interpretation
G – Genre
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 HYMES’ SPEAKING GRIDS
What Hymes offers us in his SPEAKING formula is a very necessary
reminder that talk is complex activity, and that any particular bit of talk is actually a
piece of „skilled work‟. To be successful, the speaker must reveal a sensitivity to and
awareness of each of the eight factors outlined above. Speakers and listeners must
also work to see that nothing goes wrong. When speaking does go wrong, as it
sometimes does, that going-wrong is often clearly describable in terms of some
neglect of one or more of the factors. Since we acknowledge that there are „better‟
speakers and „poorer‟ speakers, we may also assume that individuals vary in their
ability to manage and exploit the total array of factors. Working with an ethnographic
or functional approach, then, we may attempt to specify just what is meant to be a
competent speaker of a particular language.

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 Factors:
1. The Setting and Scene (S) of speech are important.
Setting refers to the time and place, i.e., the concrete physical circumstances in which
speech takes place. Scene refers to the abstract psychological setting, or the cultural
definition of the occasion.
Example:
The Queen‟s Christmas message has its own unique setting and scene, as has the
President of the United States‟ annual State of the Union Address.
A particular bit of speech may actually serve to define a scene, whereas
another bit of speech may be deemed to be quite inappropriate in certain
circumstances. Within a particular setting, of course, participants are free to change
scenes, as they change the level of formality (e.g., go from serious to joyful) or as they
change the kind of activity in which they are involved (e.g., begin to drink or to recite
poetry).
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2. Participant
The Participants (P) include various combinations of speaker–listener, addressor–addressee, or
sender–receiver
Example
1) A political speech involves an addressor and addressees (the audience)
2) A telephone message involves a sender and a receiver
3) In a classroom a teacher‟s question and a student‟s response involve not just those two as
speaker and listener but also the rest of the classes‟ audience, since they too are expected to
benefit from the exchange.

3. Ends (E)
It refers to the conventionally recognized and expected outcomes of an exchange as well as to
the personal goals that participants seek to accomplish on particular occasions.
Example
A trial in a courtroom has a recognizable social end in view, but the various participants, i.e., the
judge, jury, prosecution, defense, accused, and witnesses, have different personal goals.
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4. Act sequence (A)
It refers to the actual form and content of what is said: the precise words used, how they are used,
and the relationship of what is said to the actual topic at hand.
Example:
Psychologists and communication theorists concerned with content analysis have shown a similar
interest.

5. Key (K),
The fifth term refers to the tone, manner, or spirit in which a particular message is conveyed: light-
hearted, serious, precise, pedantic, mocking, sarcastic, pompous, and so on. The key may also be
marked nonverbally by certain kinds of behavior, gesture, posture, or even deportment

6. Instrumentalities (I)
It refers to the choice of channel, e.g., oral, written, or telegraphic, and to the actual forms of
speech employed, such as the language, dialect, code, or register that is chosen. Formal, written,
legal language is one instrumentality; spoken Newfoundland English is another; code-switching
between English and Italian in Toronto is a third;16 and the use of Pig Latin is still another.
7. Norms of interaction and interpretation (N)
It refers to the specific behaviors and properties that attach to speaking and also to how these
may be viewed by someone who does not share them, e.g., loudness, silence, gaze return, and so
on.
Example:
There are certain norms of interaction with regard to church services and conversing with
strangers.

8. Genre (G)
The final term, refers to clearly demarcated types of utterance; such things as poems, proverbs,
riddles, sermons, prayers, lectures, and editorials. These are all marked in specific ways in contrast
to casual speech. Of course, in the middle of a prayer, a casual aside would be marked too.
While particular genres seem more appropriate on certain occasions than on others, e.g., sermons
inserted into church services, they can be independent: we can ask someone to stop „sermonizing‟;
that is, we can recognize a genre of sermons when an instance of it, or something closely
resembling an instance, occurs outside its usual setting
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-THANK YOU-