English Language Teaching in its Social Context

324 JOAN SWANNYou will also need to think about the representativeness of the types of talk you wishto examine. For instance, how are you selecting the types of activity that you wish to recordand analyse? Do these cover the full range of activities normally encountered? Or are youcontrasting contexts you think are distinctive in some way?If you are carrying out a small-scale investigation focusing on talk in one or twocontexts, there are two important points to bear in mind about the samples of talk youeventually come up with:Your observations may provide great insights into peoples’ conversational strategies,the way they manage certain activities or their understanding of certain concepts -but you cannot make broad generalizations on the basis of a small number ofobservations. For instance, observations of peoples’ behaviour in one set of contextsdo not provide evidence of how they ‘generally’ behave.A related point is that there are problems in making inferences about people’s abilitiesor understanding on the basis ofwhat they happen to do when you are recording them.For instance, just because students do not produce certain types of talk does not meanthey cannot. On the other hand, students may develop coping strategies that make itappear they understand more than they do.Adopting a researcher stanceA distinction is commonly made in research between participant and non-participantobservation. A participant observer is someone who takes part in the event she or he isobserving; a non-participant observer does not take part. There are practical difficultieswith this distinction: for instance, by virtue of being in a classroom (or meeting, etc.), orby setting up recording equipment, you are to some extent a participant - and you are likelyto have an effect on people’s language behaviour. The linguist Labov identified what hetermed ‘the observer’s paradox’ (Labov, 1970) ~ that the mere act of observing people’slanguage behaviour (or, for that matter, other aspects of their behaviour) is inclined to changethat behaviour. Different effccts arc likely to be produced by different observers (it maymatter whether an observer is female or male, or perceived as relatively senior or junior).Many linguistic researchers (such as Labov himself) have attempted, in various ways, tominimise the intrusion of their observations in order to obtain more ‘authentic’ data. Othershave argued that such detachment is not a reasonable research goal:We inevitably bring our biographies and our subjectivities to every stage ofthe research process, and this influences the questions we ask and the ways in whichwe try to find answers. Our view is that the subjectivity of the observer should notbe seen as a regrettable disturbance but as one element in the human interactionsthat comprise our object of study. Similarly, research subjects themselves are activeand reflexive beings who have insights into their situations and experiences.They cannot be observed as if they were asteroids, inanimate lumps of matter: theyhave to be interacted with. (Cameron, Frazer, Harvey, Rampton and Richardson,1992, p. 5)For educationists researching in their own institutions, or institutions with which they havea close association, it will probably be impossible to act as a completely detached observer.It will be impossible, for instancc, to maintain a strict separation between your role as anobserver and your usual role as a teacher or a colleague. When interpreting the talk you