English Language Teaching in its Social Context

328 JOAN SWANNMaking field-notesFicld-notes allow you to jot down, in a systematic way, your observations on activitiesand events. Thcy provide useful contextual support for audio and video recordings, andmay also be an important source of information in their own right. For instance, if yourfocus is on students in a particular lesson, you may wish to make notes on a (related)discussion between teachers; on other lessons you are unable to record; or on the lessonyou are focusing on, to supplement your audio/video recordings.You may also wish to makenotes on the audio/video recordings themselves, as a prelude to (and a context for)transcription.If you are taking notcs of a discussion or lesson on the spot, you will find that the talkflows very rapidly. This is likely to be the case particularly in informal talk, such as talkbetween students in a group. More formal talk is often easier to observe on the spot. Inwhole-class discussion led by a teacher, or in formal meetings, usually only one person talksat a time, and participants may wait to talk until nominated by the teacher or chair. Theteacher or chair may rephrasc or summarirle what others speakers have said. The slightlymore ordered nature of such talk gives an observer more breathing space to take notes.It is usual to date notes and to provide brief contextual information.The format adoptcdis highly variable - depending on particular research interests and personal preferences.Figure 20.1 shows extracts from field-notes made by my Open University colleague JanetMaybin while watching an assembly in a school in the south-cast of England. Janet Maybin’sobservations form part of a larger study of 10-1 2 year old children’s collaborative languagepractices in school. In this extract, she was interested in identifying the values laid down inschool assemblies. She wanted to see whcthcr, and how, these might resurface later inchildren’s talk in other contexts.Janet Maybin was not taking an active part in the assembly, so she could jot downobservations and briefcomments at the time. She also audio-recorded the assembly for lateranalysis (she occasionally jots down counter numbers in her field-notes). After school, shewrote up her ficld-notes, separating observations (what actually happened) from acommentary (her questions, reflections, interpretations, ideas for things to follow up later).Separating ‘observation’ from ‘commentary’ is useful in that it encourages the observerto think carefully about what they have observed, and to try out different interpretations.Bear in mind, however, that no obscrvation is entirely free from interpretation: what youfocus on and how you describe events will already depend on an implicit interpretiveframework.Making a transcriptIn order to analyse spoken language at any level of detail, you will need to make a writtentranscript. Transcription is, however, very time-consuming. Edwards and Westgate (1 994)suggest that every hour’s recording may require 15 hours for transcription. I find that I canmake a rough transcript more quickly than this, but a detailed transcript may take far longer,particularly if a lot of nonvcrbal or contextual information is included.In small-scale research, transcripts may be used selectively. For instance, you couldtranscribe (timed) extracts - say 10 minutes from a longer interaction.You could use fieldnotesto identify certain extracts for transcription; or you could makc a rough transcript ofan interaction to identify general points of interest, then more detailed transcripts of relevantextracts.