Conclusiones

As mentioned earlier, I followed a qualitative ethnographic case study design in order to gain a comprehensive and a more definitive picture of what was happening in the classroom where I conducted my research. Stake (1995:8) points out that a case study design relies on a variety sources of data collected through various techniques that respond to research questions.

This study is a single case investigation which involved the Grade 1 class only. Observations, interviews and documents analysis were used for data collection in order to get deeper meanings of literacy practices. This design was an appropriate choice as I believed that it could provide me with an understanding of literacy in the multilingual classroom from a socio-cultural perspective. It offered a wide range of data which illuminated how literacy is developed, particularly tracking the progress of learners’ writing at their first year of formal schooling. In this study any actions and events that took place in literacy lessons were regarded important because they formed part of both teachers’ and learners’ behavior in daily classroom practices. This is consistent with Fetterman’s (1989:11) idea that ethnography is an inquiry which focuses on the more predictable patterns of human thought and behaviour.

An ethnographer needs to seek for a ‘deeper immersion’ for the sake of understanding research participants’ daily practices (Emerson et al., 1995). It is, therefore, necessary for the researcher to immerse himself/herself in the research field in order to study people’s social reality and to gather personal experiences. This is in line with this statement:

With immersion, the field researcher sees from the inside how people lead their lives, how they carry out their daily rounds of activities, what they find meaningful, and how they do so (Emerson et al., 1995:2).

Further to this, we could refer to Spradley (1979:187) who mentions the three types of immersion which define ethnographic design namely, total immersion, partial immersion and spot immersion. In this study, I have followed partial immersion because I did not live in the area where learners came from to get acquainted with their cultural practices at their homes and

in the entire community. Although I learnt both the school and the classroom culture in terms of literacy practices, I could not learn all the diverse languages spoken by learners which might possibly qualify this study to a total immersion. Though I followed partial immersion, I spent sufficient time in the field to observe and monitor the development of writing in young learners. My partial immersion in the school afforded me an opportunity to understand and interpret the experienced events and actions in context (see Chapter 4).

Yin (2009:20) mentions different applications of a case study design in research enquiry, some of which tie in with ethnographic requirements e.g. to explain the phenomenon and to describe things or situations as they happen in a certain context. An understanding of context in ethnographic studies helps to provide ‘thick’ rather than ‘thin’ description. Henning et al., (2004:7) assert that behind descriptive studies is not to generalize the events the researcher encountered in the classroom, but what is important is to understand the events occurring in a particular context. Hence understanding the context and meaning is the central feature of ethnographic studies (Geertz, 1973). This implies that whatever is seen in the immediate context of the subject studied might not provide an in-depth meaning unless the researcher looks beyond the events that occur in the research context. I had to take this into consideration when doing my research as I had to familiarize myself with the socio-cultural backgrounds of the learners and the school context before understanding and interpreting meaning from the daily literacy practices. Therefore, it was important for me to understand the learners’ background by accessing their portfolios and holding informal conversations and an interview with the teacher in order to gain information beyond what I observed in the classroom. In other words, the description of events had to go deeper than what I saw in the classroom through observations as ethnography suggests that “each scene exists within a multilayered and interrelated context” (Fetterman, 1989:29).

Furthermore, an ethnographic design requires a variety of data collection methods and analysis methods in order to strive for credibility (Babbie and Mouton, 2001:20; Fetterman (1989:29). As I followed an ethnographic case study design, I used multiple data collection methods namely observations, interviews and I analyzed learners’ written work using the Writing Developmental Continuum and the Multimodal Analytical Tool with experiential metafunction for triangulation purposes. This corresponds with Yin’s (2009:101) statement that a good case study ought to rely

on multiple sources of evidence in data collection in order to make the collected information more reliable. This study had to strive for reliability through the use of different ethnographic methods to collect data from the classroom i.e. observations, interviews and document analysis. These methods complemented each other in that what could not be captured by observations was followed up through interviews and document analysis to triangulate observation filed notes.