Reglas de los Fondos de Inversión

Initially, I had two recorders and a smart pen when I set off for fieldwork. After keeping the recorder with me the first few days, I gradually positioned the recorder on the table where my participant was seated, most often besides him or her. At first since I had the major concern of spreading out the limited time I had so as to be able to produce data with all eight participants, I thought of getting more recorders so I could record all participants at the same time and thus maximise on the time I had. However, I quickly gave up this idea because although observation entails the opening of one’s eyes, I did not have additional pairs of eyes and seated at the back of the classroom as I was – most of the time far from my participants – I could not split myself in

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three or four parts and would not be able to observe fully all three or four students at the same time if I wanted to produce data. Heller (2010, p.257) states that in ethnography, “many people spend a lot of time worrying about how to be a fly on the wall”. I was still at that time, determined to make my presence felt as little as possible and sticking to the chair that had been given to me at the back of the class was one way of doing so.

However, I was very much aware of the fact that observation meant “discovering where it is that things relevant to our concerns occur, and under what circumstances” (Heller, 2010, p.257) and thus I decided to concentrate on only one participant at a time and spread the time I had left producing data with my participants, one at a time. After the initial skimming of the contextual realities of both classes, I decided to spend the next two weeks in the Standard Three classroom to work with Stevie, Larry and Piper. As was outlined previously, just putting an audio-recorder near my participant whilst being seated at the back of the classroom as silent observer was not going to work in this study. I neither had lapel micro-recorders which I could attach to their lapels, as was the case in the research done by Blackledge and Creese (2010). During that period, I decided to drop my eighth participant in the third class, realising that the time I had at my disposal would not be sufficient for an immersion into a third classroom context. It was also dawning on me that the initial week spent to get a feel of the classroom context of the two classes was indeed very superficial and more time needed to be devoted to better understand each of my participants for me to find the best strategy to produce data with each of them, considering the number of challenges I was currently facing to record each of my participants’ linguistic repertoires.

I returned home after having spent the whole day observing Larry, seated at the back of the classroom truing to make myself as small as the fly on the wall. I had kept a recorder on Larry’s desk to record his linguistic repertoire and had kept one in my hand as a safety measure. I had around eight pages of field notes and approximately six hours of recording but hardly much of it was relevant data since most of the data was dominated by teacher talk. I, thus, realised that being the fly on the wall and maximising the number of hours of audio-recorded data was simply proving to be a total waste of time. Of course, I understood the relatively non-engagement of the learners within the circumscribed classroom rule-based and teacher-framed environment as being useful data, but I wanted more. Heller (2010, p.257) contends that doing ethnographic research means that ethnographers are “present by virtue of the question (asked) and what (they) attend to, and (they) are best off taking (their) participation fully into account”. It was around that time that I also

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realised that becoming a linguistic ethnographer entailed taking control of the data production really and being responsible for producing data instead of just sitting and expecting that data would collect itself in the recorder for me. I, hence, decided to shorten my recording time by recording instances of talk instead of stretches of classroom conversation, which was dominated by the teacher’s voice.

Since the children still did not have a KM teacher, I decided to make the most of the time available and after asking permission from the GP teacher, Miss Ariana, I moved from being a fly on the wall to being the producer of data, right in the centre of action. From that day, I started my chitchatting phase where I made the most of the time I had at my disposal when the learners were free from the teaching activities to engage them in a conversation and thereby record their conversation (See later section). But before doing so, I still had to deal with the problem of learning how to audio-record the repertoire of children aged 6-8 years old. All the decisions33 that I made during the those initial days only led me to understand that I could not just sit back and erase my presence but that I had indeed to get my hands dirty and be responsible for producing data, whether it was to engage in conversation with my participants, moving to sit with them and holding the recorder in my hands.