Unobtrusive textography of a university building as an innovative research method
Creators: name: Sizer, Jennifer
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2014

description: https://prezi.com/view/TD8yGZaOF5m19RWWVqNC/ 
description: In ‘Other floors other voices’ (1998) Swales describes his textography as: ‘something more than a disembodied textual analysis, but something less than a full ethnographic account’ or more simply: a ‘site-based textographic study’. This small-scale research project uses an unobtrusive site-based textography of one faculty’s (creative and cultural industries) building at a post-92 university. The research was undertaken after difficulties in preparing a faculty-specific EAP course due to limited range of ESAP resources and literature/research featuring art and design/creative and cultural industries. The study’s main purpose is to investigate how is/are the community e.g. faculty, or communities e.g. course teams/departments, represented through texts produced and displayed within a university building. The research aims to ‘go as far as we can’ (Hyland, 2006) in terms of specitifity by understanding texts ESAP students may encounter and/or produce. This project also provided opportunities to reflect on what [if anything] we can discover about the community through texts via unobtrusive methods. This project utilises an interpretivist paradigm based onontological assumptions of communities inhabiting and participating in different worlds/realities, as well as a different building, and epistemological assumptions of a community’s co-constructed, highly contextual and specific knowledge which requires interpretation. Pretextual analysis used archival research of historical documents and images to provide a historical and contextual picture of the building and community. Posttextual analysis used ethnographic methods i.e. fieldwork including the photography of places, spaces and texts within the building. The findings suggest a faculty community with a shared past, shared building and shared future, but also seems to suggest smaller communities e.g. courses and departments within the wider community. The images depict some aspects of the building’s complex linguistic landscape. The texts themselves demonstrate the community’s routine business: the boundaries, the rules, the rituals (the ‘grad show’ [final year exhibition]), the rhythms and the routines (academic year). This presentation may be useful for: Practitioners seeking to understand academic communities with limited available ESAP literature and/or resources. Practitioners attempting to engage with an academic community but limited opportunities for collaboration or even cooperation. Practitioners at initial stages of research i.e. a ‘quick and dirty’ study before ethical approval.

Further EdD research planned using ethnographic methods with one community’s texts, i.e. architecture department, in order to interpret meanings (and discover hidden or alternative meanings) of texts and co-construct further meanings and findings.

ReferencesBen-Rafael, E. (2009). A Sociological Approach to the study of linguistic landscapes. In E. Shohamy & D. Gorter (Eds.), A linguistic landscape: expanding the scenery. London: Routledge. Retrieved from:https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=YH2QAgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=falseHeng, T. (2017). Visual methods in the field Photogpraphy for the social sciences. Abingdon: Routledge.Hyland, K. (2006). English for academic purposes. An advanced resource book. Oxon: Routledge.Hyland, K. (2016). Conceptions of EAP. In K. Hyland & P. Shaw (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of English for Academic Purposes. Taylor & Francis.Kara, H. (2015). Creative research methods in the social sciences. Bristol: Policy Press.Paltridge, B. (2004). The exegesis as a genre: an ethnographic examination. In L. . Ravelli & R. A. Ellis (Eds.), Analysing Academic Writing. Retrieved fromhttps://books.google.co.uk/books?id=oi1XZ4MwYm8C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=falsePaltridge, B. (2008). Textographies and the researching and teaching of writing. Iberica, 15, 9–24.Sayer, P. (2010). Using the linguistic landscape as a pedagogical resource. ELT Journal, 64(2). https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccp051Swales, J. (1998). Textography: Toward a Contextualization of Written Academic Discourse. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 31(1), 109–121. Swales, J. M. (1998). Other floors. A textography of a small university building. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc.Traweek, S. (1988). Beamtimes and lifetimes : the world of high energy physicists. Harvard: Harvard University Press.