As mentioned in section 3.1.2, participant observation has long been associated with ethnographic studies, in which the researcher becomes immersed in the social life of the researched group in order to provide a detailed description of various phenomena (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995; Esterberg, 2002; Dörnyei, 2007).
I have been a member of the IWU community as part of the faculty since 2006 and have thus participated in community events over the years. I have served on committees, attended chapel services, participated in community meetings, and spoken on panels sponsored by the Student Government Association (SGA). These experiences have contributed to my own identity formation as a Christian and a faculty member at a faith- based university. This emic perspective enables me to reflect on this process from both the insider and outsider perspectives.
I used the interviews with first-year students as the primary data source since my research questions directly related to their first-year experience. However, I also conducted
fieldwork on campus as a secondary data source. The purpose of the fieldwork was to identify the language used by the established members in conjunction with the established practices of the community. Wenger (1998) views membership in a community of practice as translated “into an identity as a form of competence” (p. 153). The fieldwork provided evidence of a repertoire of competence from which students can draw in their process of identity construction. Consequently, I observed and took notes in official university gatherings, chapel services, and faculty meetings during the 2015-2016 academic year. I chose these venues for participant observation because they represent the kinds of gatherings in which one commonly hears the language of established community members. These gatherings, particularly chapel services, also serve as instructive means for spiritual growth, specifically for the students, and would presumably offer a rich source for Christianese data.
Prior to beginning my fieldwork, I reviewed Hymes’ (1974) SPEAKING model to inform my approach to taking field notes. Hymes designed the model to analyze discourse as a series of speech events and speech acts within the broader framework of the ethnography of communication. Each letter of the acronym corresponds to the first letter of the term for speech components, as seen in Figure 3.4.
I did not follow this model precisely as I took field notes because my study does not address the language data as speech events. However, the speech components in the model helped guide the kind of notes I took as well as my reflection on the field notes after each
observation.
For the fieldwork, I attended and observed the University Convocation (mentioned in Chapter 1) that precedes the beginning of the academic year: during this gathering, the president of the university presents awards to various members of the university community and gives a message that serves to remind the faculty and staff of our purpose at IWU and exhort us to continue our work. I also observed three of the chapel services during the New Student Orientation (NSO) week (described in section 3.2.1), as well as a class that debriefed one of those chapel messages with the new first-year students. I attended a number of faculty meetings of which I took brief notes on two. I also observed two student-led events: the first was a forum on gender and sexuality sponsored by the Student Government Association (SGA), and the second was a kind of prayer meeting sponsored by three different groups of student spiritual leaders called Project: Unify. Finally, I observed several chapel services with the entire student body multiple times over the year.
I completed the majority of the fieldwork in the fall semester because I had a reduced teaching load in order to devote extra time to my research; I resumed my full teaching responsibilities in the spring semester in addition to completing the last two sets of
interviews. Ultimately, the fieldwork, summarized in Table 4.1 below, enabled me to identify some of the common practices within the university that occurred early in the academic year. Table 3.1 Fieldnotes summary
Location/Type of Event Event Attended Date Observed
University-wide gathering University Convocation August 25, 2015
Chapel NSO Opening chapel
NSO Life Calling chapel NSO Strengths Quest chapel 1st chapel of academic year
August 31 September 2 September 3 September 7
Joni Eareckson Tada Dean of Chapel John Bray MLK
Summit evening service
October 16 October 19 January 15 January 20 Faculty-only event MLL Division Retreat
Faculty Meeting
August 27 September 23 Academic class Debrief to Strengths Quest September 3 Student-led event SGA Forum: Gender & Sexuality
Project: Unify
November 4 March 2 The majority of my field notes covered chapel experiences because chapel is
considered a key avenue of spiritual growth for the students at IWU, required for all students three times per week. Each chapel service includes a worship band that plays two or three contemporary worship songs, prayer usually led by a student worship major, and a sermon- like message. For each of my field observations, I tried to sit near the back of the venue – either on the floor or in the balcony when available – because I had a better view of the rest of the room and audience.
As I mentioned earlier, this fieldwork offered evidence of the linguistic repertoire within the IWU community of practice, particularly as it relates to the faith element within the community. I took the majority of the fieldnotes in gatherings whose purpose served to encourage the growth and development of students’ faith. However, it is important to note that these often occurred in formal settings, such as chapel, which differed from the setting where the interviews took place.
These settings maintain different levels of formality and corresponding levels of authority (Joos, 1967); for example, official worship services on campus can be categorized within a formal style in which speakers serve to inform the audience with no verbal response back from the audience (p. 35), thus bestowing a degree of authority on the speakers. In contrast, the semi-structured interviews overlap two styles of Joos’ taxonomy: consultative and casual. In the consultative style, the speech participants engage in some kind of dialogue. These participants are typically strangers and must provide background information because
the listener may not understand without it (p. 23). The casual style is less formal and typically occurs among friends or close acquaintances. There is less need for background information because the participants have insider status (p. 23). As one goes down the ladder of formality, the speakers’ authority decreases. Thus, the linguistic practices that came out in the
interviews offered a kind of “echo” of the repertoire noted in the fieldwork. Despite their formal nature, the locations for the majority of the fieldwork offered a glimpse into the linguistic repertoire of those who hold authority within university community, and thus act as a kind of linguistic model, while the interviews provided evidence of the language used by newcomers to the community, which included those students who participated more and less with the linguistic repertoire in which they were currently immersed.