translate into Chinese. This study centers on a Facebook group created in fall 2012 for a linguistics course at a 
university in Hong Kong. Students enrolled in the course were mainly English and English 
Education undergraduates. There were 196 members in the group: one lecturer, six tutors,
and 189 students. Generally, the group served as a platform where members expressed ideas, 
raised questions, and discussed matters related to the course outside of class. It was also a 
platform where the lecturer regularly uploaded documents such as handouts and PowerPoint 
slides. Student members could participate in it in various ways, including initiating and 
discussing course-related topics, sharing multimedia contents, commenting on posts 
contributed by others, and “Like”-ing postings. Participation in the group was voluntary; it
did not formally constitute part of the assessment. Students were never instructed in what 
they must or must not do in the group as well.
Informed largely by Androutsopoulos’ (2008) discourse-centered online ethnography, our
study involves systematic observation of the group and its discourse, as well as contact with 
members. Various types of data were collected, including screen data and semi-structured 
interviews. During ethnographic observation, we monitored discourse activities that took 
place in the group and semiotic resources participants deployed for different activities from 
7
September 2012 to December 2013. Members did visit the group occasionally and interacted 
with others after the semester-long course was over; this explains the period of observation. 
All postings were afterwards collected as screen data. This systematic observation, which 
lays emphasis on the scrutiny of both processes and products, was conducive to the selection 
of screen data for further analyses and of potential participants for direct contact at a later 
stage. It was also through being in the space in which communication was ongoing that we 
could capture how practices evolved effectively (see also Kytölä and Androutsopoulos (2012) 
for the methodological merits of ethnographically grounded observation). 
To better understand how the group was used, we conducted a basic content analysis and 
identified its discourse functions. Our initial reading of the data suggested that the functions 
were similar to those provided by Schallert et al. (2009), whose study revolved around online 
classroom discussions. Schallert et al.’s (2009) coding scheme thus served as a good point of 
departure. After the content analysis, we studied the linguistic features with the help of 
previous discussions and studies (e.g. Crystal, 2006; Herring, 2012; Author, 2007). Linguistic 
features here refer largely to the typographic and orthographic features that have been found 
to be prevalent in CMC, such as shortenings, emoticons, and non-standard spellings. In 
addition, syntactic and discoursal features, as well as other linguistic features unique to 
Facebook were examined.
As for the contact with members, in addition to approaching members for clarifications 
throughout the analysis, we identified six case participants based on the ethnographic 
observation and conducted a semi-structured interview with each of them. These participants 
were chosen as they performed diversely in terms of their observable linguistic practices and 
degree of involvement. This could ensure reasonable “‘richness’ of individual cases” 
(Androutsopoulos, 2008). The interviews were composed of three parts: i) the interviewee’s
life history in relation to Facebook, ii) participation in the group, and iii) linguistic practices 
in the group. The idea of including the first part was inspired by studies that adopted a 
techno-biographic approach to interviews (e.g. Ching and Vigdor, 2005; Graham, 2008; 
Author, 2014). Authors (2013) have listed major areas and questions that researchers can 
include while doing techno-biographic interviews; part of them was integrated into the first 
part, with a specific focus on Facebook. The second part was concerned with the 
interviewee’s participation in the group; key questions on identities were included. The final 
part was, in essence, in the form of a stimulated recall task. An increasingly popular method 
in educational and second language research, stimulated recall is an introspective method 
through which a researcher looks into what a participant thinks during a task by providing the 
participant with a stimulus, that is, a video-recording or sound-recording of the task (see, e.g. 
Gass and Mackey, 2000; Lyle, 2003). In this study, stimuli were postings produced by 
interviewees. We provided the textual data to elicit specific responses and facilitate in-depth 
discussions. It was also of crucial importance to examine what interviewees were thinking 
while reading and producing the relevant texts. Being well aware that there was a relatively 
long interval between the production of postings and interviews, we emphasized to the 
interviewees that they could be honest if they did not remember any details upon the 
stimulated recalls. Overall, the design allows us to integrate the study of practices fully into 
the analysis of texts (Author, 2013) and acknowledges the synergy between “screen data” and 
“user-based data” (Androutsopoulos, 2014).