final project kathryn ticknor eoc

7/31/2019 Final Project Kathryn Ticknor EoC

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TICKNORS LEGAL OUTLINES

Linguistics in Law School

Ethnograph

y of

Part

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Communica

tion


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L INGUIST ICS IN LAW SCHOOL

Ethnography of Communication

Copyright 2011by TickTalk Communications600 New Jersey Avenue, NW

Washington, D.C. 20002Phone 202.662.9401 Fax 202.662.9412


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Table of Contents

Introduction to Ethnography of Communication...................................................2You, Doin That Thing You Do!............................................................................. 4Setting the Precedent: Literature Review ............................................................. 7Welcome to the Georgetown University Law Center .........................................10On the Record: Looking at Field Notes ..............................................................11

A Guy Walks into the American Bar Association ...............................................14Hypothetically Speaking ...................................................................................... 18Review Session ................................................................................................... 19


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L I N G U I S T I C S I N L A W S C H O O L

Chapter

1


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The field of ethnography is primarily concerned with thedescription of cultures. Although the word culture itself can betricky to define, in the ethnographic context it can be said to referto a group which come together for a purpose and constitute a

speech community. The members of these communities share rulesfor communication, interaction, cultural rules knowledge to helpthem participate appropriately within the group (Saville-Troike).Since language is fundamental to interaction, Dell Hymes proposesa hybrid endeavor where linguistic description is combined withcultural observations. Our purpose in conducting ethnography ofcommunication is to examine not only what characterizes law schoollanguage, but also how that language fits into the greater social lifeand cultural practices of the community. Historically ethnographieswere conducted by studying those groups considered exotic (bycomparison, at least, to the personal experience of the academic

likely to be conducting it): indigenous tribes, isolated ruralcommunities, and non-Western populations comprised the corpora.More recently, however, ethnographers have turned towardssmaller, local, institutionally-based communities, such as places ofbusiness, schools and neighborhoods, as equally opportunelocations to conduct field work. In this Linguistics in LawSchool outline, the ethnography of communication will be appliedto just such a community: law school.

THIS OUTL INE WIL L SHOW HO W ET HN O G R A PHY A L L O W S U S T O

M A K E L I N K A G ES B ET W EEN L I N G U I S T I C PA T T ER N S A N DM EA N I N G FU L C U L T U R AL PR A C T I C ES.

Beyond learning how to read a Supreme Court case, write a legalmemo, or argue in front of a jury, the linguistic practices lawstudents acquire become a vital expression of their membershipwithin the law school ecosystem. Just as they may recognizeanother law student by the case books under their arm, the stainedWestLaw coffee mug in their hand, or the myriad rainbow

highlighters spilling from their pockets, the way theyspeak also marks them as a member of that community.In order to understand what it means to be a law student

or a professor at law, we need to not only payattention to what is said, but also to what thetraditions, norms and practices of the communityare. As ethnographer Tony Watson puts it, totalk of someones identity surely requires that, to areasonable extent, we get to know them and thecontext in which they live and work.

Legalcommunicat

ivecompetenceis not simply"picked up";it is a

To talk of someonesidentity surelyrequires that, to areasonableextent, we get toknow them andthe context inwhich they liveand work.


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You, Doin That Thing You Do!


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While it may seem obvious at first, they key to conductingethnography with an eyeand earfor language, is tounderstand what it means to observe. Erving Goffman,addressing an audience of fellow social scientists, noted that

the practice of participant observation is done by one of twokinds of finks. Police on the one hand and us on the other.Many sociolinguists have departed from the Chomskiannotion that language should be analyzed more or less apartfrom how it is used, and adopted the attitude of Hymes, whoasserts that language cannot be separated from how andwhy it is used (Saville- Troike).Thevalue of ethnography lies in itsinterdisciplinary natureusinga variety of methods we are able toconstruct a thick description, or

what Frederick Erickson calls aDagwood sandwich description.This is not to say that close linguisticanalysis is excluded, but rather, it islayered in between paralinguisticand nonverbal observations. Variety is seen not only in thetype of data collected, but how the data is collected. AsMurielle Saville-Troike, points out, the individual settings andideas of appropriateness for ethnographers should thuscommand a repertoire of field methods from which to selectaccording to the occasion. Rather than picking out a

community that is best fit for the type of analysis we wish toconduct, ethnography provides several methodologicalframeworks for us to choose fromallowing us to tailor ourdata collection to the community instead of the other wayaround.

These include:

Introspection

Ideal / real distinction: e.g. drivers at a stop sign

Participant Observation

Observation

Interviewing

Ethnosemantics / Ethnoscience

Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis

Discourse Analysis

Philology

M U R I E L

S A V I

L L E -

T R O I

K E S

E L E M

E N T S


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In combination, these methods can produce thick descriptions,including observations both etic (that which can be describedquantitatively) and emic (that which we qualify) and turn intosocial facts (Erickson 1977). The question of ethics also comes

into play. To be secretly conducting ethnography of a communitywithout their knowledge and consent is not only unethical, but alsodeprives you of a chance to share you findings in a meaningful waywith the community itself.

And what of the ethnographer herself in this process? What role dowe play as we observe, scribbling in notebooks or typing away onour laptops?

Goffman describes the ethnographic collection of data as subjectingyourself, your own body and your own personality, and your own

social situation, to the set of contingencies that play upon a setof individuals, so that you can physically and ecologicallypenetrate their circle of response to their social situation. Sothat you are close to them while they are responding to what lifedoes to them.

As best we can, our role is to participate enough to feel whiledoing as little as possible to influence the norms of the communityand remaining forthright about our scholarly intentions. Thisbalancing act is difficult, but ultimately very rewarding. LinguistAnna Trester reminds us to be vigilant for a-ha moments, where

things which may have seemed illusive or confusing suddenly click,revealing their importance to the community. Often, it is discomfortor awkwardness that can signal that signal you are on the brink ofan a-ha moment. As Koonig and Ooi explain, awkward momentshint at our own personal emotional agenda in the field and revealour weaknesses in controlling the field situation (2010).

Other times our communities of study may notseem so strange or awkward. This, too, presentschallenges for the ethnographer. Erickson recallsMalinowskis goal to note the imponderabilia of

actual life and everyday behavior. Whenworking in a community that resembles our own,the impoderabilia is inherently masked by its veryfamiliarity. When observing communities througha wider lens, it becomes even more important tobe aware of what preconceptions we may haveabout who these people are, what they do, andwhy or how they do it. In order to remove yourself

It can take a while to tuneyour body toobserving. At first

you may feel likea professionalcreeper! Embraceuncomfortablemoments asthose with thegreatest potentialto reveal framemismatches. Andabove all

remember: this isforscience.


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from as many of these assumptions as possible, there is a playfulprocess of making strange, as Duranti calls it, that which seemscommon, normal, or obvious: changing the familiar into thestrange and vice versa, the strange into the familiar (1982). With

this tabula rasa mindset, we can also come close to approximatingthe experience of a first year students entering law school: theymay think they know, but chances are, they have no idea.

Its time now, for the first day of law school.

Setting the Precedent: Literature Review

Linguists recognize the classroom as a rich field for studying discourse

and interaction. Ericksons Some Approaches to Inquiry inSchool-Community Ethnography (1977) is an excellentintroduction to using schools as communities of observation. Aswe will see later in this outline, storytelling is an importantelement of many communities, and the law school is noexception. Wallace Chafes Discourse, Consciousness, andTime, especially Ch. 18 Representing Other Speech andThought in First-Person Fiction with Displaced Immediacyexplore how people use language to expand their range ofinformation beyond their own immediate experiences, usingreferred-to speech, direct speech, indirect speech, and verbatim

indirect speech (237).

Other sociolinguistic studies have focused on student-teacherinteraction. Although the majority have looked at elementaryschool settings or the English as a Second Language classroom(Csomay 2007), the number of studies examining the languageof classroom interaction in higher education is growing. The


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traditional linguistic framework of Conversation Analysis takes amagnifying glass to transcripts of interactional data in order tosee how competent members of a given society routinely carryout and make accountable their everyday actions (Heritage and

Atkinson 1984, Sarangi and Roberts 1999). Richard West andJudy Pearson, for example, investigated questioning in theirstudy Antecedent and Consequent Conditions of StudentQuestioning: An Analysis of Classroom Discourse (1994). UsingCA, they investigated student and teacher questioning patterns,as it related to two primary research questions: 1) what typesof questions do students ask in classrooms? and 2) whatantecedent and consequent conditions exist when students aska question? Camilla Vasques, for her part, has looked atquestioning in university discourse as it relates to formulations,specifically the distributions, functions, and responses to two

types of explicit formulations (what youre saying is and areyou saying that) in university discourse, as an indicator of howthose formulations indicate that in higher education just asin therapeutic contexts the production of formulations ishighly constrained by participants institutional roles and theirrelative power (2010). Other studies have looked at stance(Biber 2006) and variation (Csomay 2007) in higher educationclassrooms.

The wide use of CA in analyzing higher educationclassrooms likely comes from the increasing amount of workabledata available to researchers. Indeed, most of the CA-based

empirical studies, the most popular data source was the largecorpora of university recordings thatmake up the Michigan and TOEFLdatabases. The MICASE corpus is a free,publicly available, online corpuscomprised of 152 transcripts and nearlytwo million words which includes arange of both speech activity types anddisciplines, as well as somedemographic information aboutspeakers (Vasques 2010). The existence

of this corpus makes transcriptions,along with information about theparticipants, readily available and

therefore more studies can take place. In addition, data on lawschool interaction is completely missing from the MICASEcorpus. But even if it were, listening to tapes only would not beconsidered ethnographic, because the community is not directlyobserved.


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Running parallel to the discourse on education is linguistic research

on the legal institution. Typical subjects of study includeinterrogations, on-the-stand lawyer/witness questioning, and

jury deliberations. While legal discourse has largely beenaddressed by the field of forensic linguistics, often through theframework of conversation analysis, another gap exists toconnect legal discourses to educational discourses. Thecommunicative practices of a law school will necessarily bearstriking similarities to those of other upper level academicsettings, in so much the goal is preparation to advanceafterwards to a specific trade.

The exception here is the work of ElizabethMertz, who has written extensively on

discourse in U.S. law schools, specifically therelationship between linguistic ideology andpraxis of law school (2010). Wide in itsbreadth, examining data from eight differentlaw schools in the United States, Mertzendeavors to tackle the question of thelanguage of law school as a whole, frommultiple perspectives including linguisticideology, epistemology and teaching style,and identity within the social context of legal

discourse. Using observation in law school settings as well as

classroom recordings, her work covers many topics of interest toethnographers. Her work does, however, plainly build anargument towards elements of law school language and culturalstructure that she feels should be changed in order to improvethe educational value of the experience. This stance is not onethat we would find in pure ethnography, where we avoid seekingto change the structure of the community: rather to describe itfully. Additionally, her studies could benefit from other studies tolook more deeply at how law school discourse is institutional,different from other university communities, and how elementsof its discourse relate to Levinsons participant orientations,

including goal orientations, particular constraints, and inferentialframeworks (Heritage and Drew 1992).

In short, there is still much to be investigated regarding theinterplay of talk and text in creating an institution that is clearlydistinct from other higher educational settings, walking a linebetween academics and a trade-school, where the unspokenassumption is that the language used in the classroom will result


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in a law student graduating into an attorney, and joining theintuition of law afterwards. Having observed two 1st year lawstudent classes, I hope to show how questioning in these classesreflects and constructs its own institution that draws from both

the institution of law and the institution of education, yetremains distinct in its own way.

Welcome to the Georgetown University Law Center

One of the best law schools in the country, Georgetown Law is part

of the Georgetown University system located in the nationscapital, Washington, D.C. The ranking system, I would be told againand again, is extremely important to the law schools identitytop-tier schools attract the brightest students, the most money, thebest professors. It is the second largest law school in the country,graduating about 500 law students every year. As a 1L, or first yearlaw student, you follow the same curriculum as most other lawstudents around the country, and the same foundational cases. Alast name like Miranda or Daubert becomes inextricablyintertwined with an entire set of laws, cases, precedents andcourts. But your education isnt entirely based on what you read.The interactions you have in the classroom become crucial tolearning the sociolinguistic competencies youll need to succeedboth in school and after.

Given the current dearth of studies involving law schoolinteraction, which is to say, its relative dearth, Scollons sowhat? question comes to mind why should we undertake a study ofthe communicative and cultural practices of law schools? According tothe Washington Monthly, some 45,000 people graduate from lawschool every year. Multiplied annually, from a numbersperspective, that is no small group. Furthermore, because law

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students ostensibly graduate and go on to practice law, thesestudents become the people who will defend or persecute us.They help us craft our wills, our small business contracts, ourdivorce proceedings. They proceed over our trials and write our

legislation. In other words, the education of these students canhave a direct effect on us as individuals and society at large.

Choosing the GULC as my community of linguistic study was arelatively easy choice, due to the important element ofaccess. I ama full-time staff member at the law school, and have worked therefor almost two years. This gives me a familiarity with the buildings,the schedules and the professors who make up the GULC campus. Iam not, however, a law student. As we will discuss later in theoutline, there were limits on how participatory I could be. Walkinga fine line between insider and outsider in the community also had

its benefits. First, from an ethical standpoint, I was able to getpermission from each of four professorsand was even requestedby one to attend and participate based on his knowledge of my roleas linguistic ethnographer. I already had a few studentacquaintances at the school, whom I could turn to as informantsduring my observations. They were more than happy to answer myquestions and be interviewed about the law school experience.Indeedsome of them acted as if they were just waiting to beasked.

On the Record: Looking at Field Notes

During my ethnography of the law school, I attempted to get asclose to participant observation as possible, within practical limits. Icould not, for example, become a law student, sit for exams, writepapers, or be called on during classes. In this way, my observationwas removed from many of the actual emotional and culturalexperiences of most law students. While taking field notes, I madean effort to do a sort of braindump of everything that I saw,whether or not it struck me as odd. As a student of higher

education myself, there were many elements of the classroomsetting that seemed quite normal, and I might have risked notnoticing something meaningful because it seemed too banal tonote.

The data are field notes from weekly, hour long observations ofclassroom lectures as well as more spontaneous observations ofstudent interaction in public areas including hallways, the


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library, and study lounges. I also conducted several shortinterviews with several law students and professors, primarilyasking their thoughts on law school education in general. Usingprimarily my notebook computer, I was able to take field notes

in real time during my observation. The fact that almost all ofthe students I observed at the GULC had laptops eliminated anyawkwardness that this recording method might bring to anotherobservational setting.

The classes I observed were taught by four different professors,whose teaching experience at the university ranged from onesemester to 20 years. In order to impose some level ofconsistency of topic from which to observe variation, I sat in ontwo Criminal Law classes as three Torts courses. The Tortscourse is obligatory for all first year law students at the GULC.

First year classes also had the benefit of allowing me toobserve any changes in behaviors and routines as thefirst semester progressed; changes which mightindicate how the students were tuning their speech andbehavior to this new environment. The Torts classshould stand as a standard example of classroominteraction and a reliable source for examples of firstyear socialization and pedagogy.

All classes are recorded by the audio-visual departmentat the Law School. In addition to the official recording, I

also did my own recording in order to pick up the voicesof students and professors as well as possible. This also freedme to spend more time when taking field notes writingdescriptions ofnon-verbal communication and behaviors, knowing thatif I needed to go back and listen to the words again, I could.

The class format was typically of most first year classes, in somuch as it was structured to accommodate a large number ofstudents (approximately 60) and used the Socratic methodbywhich students are engaged in an is a form of inquiry anddebate between individuals with opposing viewpoints based on

asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking andto illuminate ideas. All classes that are automatically recordedby the Universitys audio-visual department are available tostudents who may have had to miss class, or would like accessto the lecture for studying purposes. The benefit of this, from alinguists perspective, is that the law students are already awareof and presumably at ease with being recorded so we can beguaranteed data that is more resistant to the observers

Cold calling occurs in

classroom

lectures when

a student is

chosen

without

volunteering

to answer a

series of

questions

posed by the

professor.

The only good isknowledge. Well,knowledge and

getting a methodof inquiry named

after you.


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paradox, where it is feared that people speak differently thannormal when they know they are being observed.

Students are engaged in a form of inquiry and debate

based on asking and answering questions to stimulatecritical thinking and to illuminate ideas known as the

Socratic Method.

A professor cold calls on a student and proceeds to drillthem about the facts of the case for what can seem like

an uncomfortably long time. This process made me feeluncomfortable as an observer, and illustrated differences in howI conceive higher education (where everyone shares ideas,more-or-less voluntarily, and maintaining students esteem) and

how differently this is conceived by law school. Law studentslearn to prepare for the possibility of this face threatening act,where the professor puts them in this1 position, by calling onthem without asking whether they would like to participate,where their self-esteem could lowered in a public sphere if theyanswered incorrectly. Certainly not all students find this methodof cold calling, cramming, and being put on the spot at anygiven time to be the best educational system. In my interviewswith students, several reported frustration and a desire to quit,that eventually faded into resignation with finishing school.Others, of course, adapt to this system as a new normal with

less trouble.

Through observation, my research questions came into focus:

What characterizes the speech of the law schoolcommunity?

What makes law school professor talk different fromother teacher talk?

And how does classroom discourse prepare students fora legal profession?

During one observation period, rather than attempting towrite down everything as I observed, I focused my field notes ona quantitative notetaking. For this exercise, a unit was chosen tobe counted. By looking at these frequencies, we can determinehow common a certain linguistic practice or pattern orphenomenon is within the community. The more often a certaindevice is used, the more it can be thought to play a role in the


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communication system of the community. Frequency is not setin stone, however: what is considered frequent can depend onthe length of the observation, and how marked the unit is. It isimportant to remember that low frequency counts can be

revealing tooif no one ever uses certain utterances, there arenew questions raised of what language is considered taboo.

For my counted unit, I selected narratives of hypotheticalsituations. This narrative was motivated partly as a result ofearlier discourse analysis of transcripts of the lectures, in whichthe interplay between pronoun use by lecturing professors andpositioning of students as lay or institutional participants withinthe story was examined. Having used a closer linguistic (CA)approach with that data, I was curious to see what how thesehypothetical situations could be interpreted from an

ethnographic lenswhich would allow me to factor inobservation, reaction, prosody and context.

A Guy Walks into the American Bar Association

. In one professors class, I noticed that the shifts betweenfirst person (I, we) and second person (you) occurred mostfrequently when professor was proposing hypothetical situations:placing the students in the role of either a lay or professional member of the legal community.

Professor : Okay. So. By statute youre allowed to sue people

after you die or after you the plaintiff die or after

you the defendant dies Why would you pass a

statute allowing these lawsuits? Yeah?

Student: It serves a deterrent.

Professor: Does it?

Student: [pause] Yes.

Professor: Okay, I got the defendant. I dont want him to do

this again. But guess what. Hes NOT gonna do it

again. Guess why. Becau::se hes dead.

Within the first sentence utterance, the professor has positionedhis students in one of two ways within the legal system: eitheras a plaintiff or a defendant in a hypothetical situation where, infact, they have died. He also asks of the class why would you


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pass a statute allowing these lawsuits? implying they are theones engaged in legislating the law. From an institutionaldiscourse perspective, we could consider the plaintiff/client rolesas lay roles, much like a patient in a medical setting or a client in

a business setting. At the same time, he also asks of the classwhy you would want to pass a certain law. Here he isdescribing engagement in the professional role of lawmaker, andstill focusing on the role of the student. Notice he did not ask,why would [lawyers/legislators/they] want to pass thislegislation? Instead those present during the lecture are castthrough use of pronouns. Whereas 2nd person you was used inhis original hypothetical situation to describe the students aseither a plaintiff or defendant, in his final utterance, he switchesto using first person I positioning himself in the story as well.

Professor: So for example if you decide you want to disinherit yourspouse, we just wont let you do that. Your spouse is

gonna get SOME money. Thats that might be true of

your children as well-meaning you would continue to be

an heir at law. Cause you would be entitled to some

statutory distribution even if the decedent makes an

effort to disinherit you.

Here again, we see students positioned in the story. While onecould argue that you here doesnt not actually apply to thestudents, and is instead a general you , it is still a linguistic choicemade instead of other possibilities: if one decides to disinherit onesspouse or if a person decides. In the hypothetical situation, ashort narrative is being told, and rather than simply describingthe situation of a person the professors use the 1st and 2nd

person pronouns, animating the students:

Professor: I am on the Supreme Court, this may be dubious, but

good news! I also have a big budget so I have hired 34

clerks.

Here, too, the professor proposes a hypothetical situation where

both he and his students are actually participating in thestoryline. He hedges a bit (this may bedubious!) regarding the probability of hisnarrative, but presses on with the storyline. Inthese hypothetical situations, a story world (Chafe)was created where the students themselves playeda role.

In these hypotheticalsituations, a storyworld was createdwhere thestudentsthemselves

played a role.


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In the majority of these situations, the story was presented as fact,using the present tense, and epistemically, the professor, in therole of storyteller, often knew not only the facts of the case, butalso the characters thoughts:

Professor: So theres a two car crash, both people have been

injured. The plaintiff has now been killed. The defendant

is now clinging to life. You know, like under Martin

circumstances, where with a really horrible life with

really horrible life with really serious injuries. And the

defendants thinking I can struggle here to live or I can

in fact just kill myself so that I avoid liability, my family

gets to recover my assets, I think Ill just kill myself or at

least ya know not take the drugs that they want to give

me.

In this example, the hypothetical situation is still presented asfact in present tense,but the students northe professor play arole in the story. Theydo, however, haveaccess to the thoughts ofthe characters in thestory, although theyare not first-personnarratives (Chafe).

At times this story world was presented so realistically thatstudents actually had to clarify whether the facts being statedwere real to the case being studied, or hypothetical.

Other times, the professor himself would clarify:

Professor: In real life, dont we think if you kill someone you oughta

have to compensate them for that anguish that they feel

now even though they would have felt it later when the

loved one ultimately died?

This professor used the expression in real life five different timesin the course of just one of my observations. Again, theethnographer asks, why would he need to use this phrase at all?In order to distinguish the current reality from the story world he


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constructs through narrative during lecture, where almostanything is possible.

There is still an element of stylistic choice. Not all professors use these

hypothetical situations as frequently as the others. In oneProfessors class, I counted five times when he began telling astory that involved a future or hypothetical situation that thestudents played a role in. This number was fewer than I wasexpecting, after hearing far more in other Torts classes. Theimportance of counting is highlighted heresometimes what wethink were observing, (whether due to past experience orexpectations) may not be the case!

In addition to stylistics, performance also variedbetween professors. There were some

interesting things to note in Professor Supersuse of hypothetical situations. He wouldchange the tone and prosody of his voice, inoften comical ways, when he using reportedspeech within the story. Other times, such asin the example above when he was speaking

as a Supreme Court justice, he would use a very low, boomingvoice, perhaps in order to convey an idea of power.

As the semester progressed, the students became more likely toadopt this method of story creation through hypotheticals. They

would stop answering questions with the lawyer would do xand enter into the story world:

Student: I think they still have to consider that they wouldyou

would have to pay for the non-pecuniary damages to the

person up until the point that that person was around.

Like, you still factor that in that there would be other

people affected by the injury that youre inflicting now

on this person.

Here we see a repairwhere a student corrects herself mid-

sentenceand instead of using 3rd personal plural they, sheadopts the teachers style of 2nd person you. This carried overinto the law school discourse, even outside of the classroom.During my observation of a study lounge, I observedcollaboration between two students tasked with drawing up amock contract:

Student 1: I would negotiate for change.

Sometimes what we thinkwere observing,

whether due topast experienceor expectations,may not be thecase!


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Student 2: The buyer would negotiate for X and then I would reject

and negotiate for Y. Thats favorable to us.

In the dialogue above, the students, outside the classroom, are

discussing what they would do in a hypothetical situation.Although this is not a story told during thelecture, they are still appropriating aprofessional voice: in an imagined futurecontext, theyare making decisions within thelegal institution, as opposed to saying what alawyerwould do, and excluding themselves

from that institution.

Hypothetically Speaking

As I continued to research the methods used by GULC professorsto cast themselves and their students as members of the legalinstitutional setting, I excitedly told a fellow linguist, whohappened to hold a law degree as well, about my findings. Idescribed to her that professors would launch into stories, toldin present tense, but which the students were expected tounderstand were irrealis, modality which conveys that the statedproposition is nonactual or nonfactual (Noonan 1985), orhypothetically possible.

Oh, yeah. Hypos. she replied.

Hypos? I gulped.

Hypothetical situations. We abbreviate it so we dont have to

say hypotheticals all the time.

Her awareness of the unit of analysis I thought I had secretlyuncovered, illustrated an extremely important point: asethnographers we cannot assume that our communities of studyare unaware of their own practices, linguistic or cultural. AsCharlotte Linde notes, sometimes what your informants tell youor could have told youin the beginning of the study aboutwhat is important and meaningful in their community will proveto be true in the end of countless hours of field work,observation, and analysis. The value in of ethnographic study,therefore, is not always to dig up a hidden treasure buried belowthe consciousness, but instead to gather actual data to quantifyand qualify its existence.

If a story is not about thehearer, he willnot listen. Eastof Eden


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And what could be the point of using these hypotheticalsituations in the law school discourse? Answering this kind of

question may be more suited to

discourse analysis, but taking intoconsideration the context of the lawschool process, we can begin tomake some evaluations. Lawstudents are only in school for threeyears, but the socialization theyundergo is expected be enough toget them going in their careers andcarry them through their cases.Words have to fulfill the role that

experience cannot.

Review Session

In this outline, we have covered the most importantelements of ethnography of communication. These include thegoals and role of the participant observer herself, how to choose acommunity of study, and how to conduct field work. We alsoexamined previous literature on linguistics in both the educationaland legal contexts, pointing out how ethnography of law school fillsa gap in the literature from both a methodological and topical

standpoint. Finally, we looked for meaningful patterns in thefieldwork, drawing from our linguistic training to make connectionsbetween speech and culture. Next, we will look more deeply atwhat analysis can be gleaned from the transcriptions of linguisticdata. As we move on from process into the realm ofproduct,consider the following questions:

1. Where do these constructed futures emerge in the data?

2. Why is the professor making up hypothetical situationsinstead of simply referencing historic cases?

3. How does this language allow students and professors toshare a culture?

A

access...............................................11E

ethnography...........3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 19G

Georgetown......................................10L

lay...............................................14, 15legalese..............................................2M

making strange...................................7P

Participant Observation......................5performance.....................................17


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professional..................2, 6, 14, 15, 18pronoun............................................14R

recording..........................................12S

socialization................................12, 19

sociolinguistic...............................7, 10Socratic Method................................13speech community.........................2, 3story world...........................15, 16, 17T

thick description.................................5Torts...........................................12, 17


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Works cited:

1. Biber, D. 2006. Stance in spoken and written university registers.

Journal of English for Academic Purposes 5.97-116.2. Chafe, Wallace. 1994.Discourse, consciousness, and time: the flow

and displacement of conscious experience in speaking and writing. Chicago: University

of Chicago Press.

3. Copenhagen Business School. CBS, Koning, Juliette, and Ooi, Can-

Seng. 2010.Awkwardness and what to do with it. Center for International Business andEmerging Markets. http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8060.

4. Csomay, Eniko. 2007. "A Corpus-Based Look at LinguisticVariation in Classroom Interaction: Teacher Talk versus Student Talk in American

University Classes".Journal of English for Academic Purposes. 6 (4): 336-355. Duff,

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