Humanities Homework Help

Essay:

The goal in writing up an essay based on this interview is to present the person(s)’ attitudes, experiences, and life story through language. Feel free to quote from the interview when you think that there are particular expressions that make their story compelling. Then, draw connections between any of the readings that are relevant.

The interview you did is an “ethnographic and linguistic data,” so in you essay, you can ethnographically and linguistically analyze the data you have. Your paper should be composed of: (1) the presentation of your data, (2) your observation/analysis. Your observation/analysis can be (1) presentation of your own thesis, that is, your own analysis, or interpretation of what to think of the data you have, and what the data tell us and (2) backing up/strengthening of your thesis by building on/connecting it to/being in dialogue with the readings, lectures, class discussions, etc.

(1)Presenting your data Tell the readers what your data is. You can tell the readers whom you interviewed, what your relationship is to them is, and what the interview was about. But, be creative in presenting your interview data, because you have a limited space and you cannot literally tell all the details of the data. You have to find a reasonable way of narrating the important or interesting parts of the data.

(2) Analyzing your data. Show the readers what your findings are about this data. What does this data demonstrate to us? What is your own thesis? How did our readings, discussions, etc help you have such a thesis? Your ethnographic analysis would be contemplating the social, cultural and political backgrounds, norms or realities that have influenced or shaped your interviewees’ linguistic life, or those that have elicited your interviewees to say, or think certain things about languages. You can also contemplate how your interviewees’ linguistic life is intertwined with your interviewees’ broader social, political and cultural realms. Your linguistic analysis would be scrutinizing the linguistic details you noticed when transcribing. For example, did certain topics make your interviewees hesitate, pause, hedge, change tones/pitches, or overlap with others’ utterances? Did certain topics bring discomfort to them, and are there linguistic evidences of such discomfort? Or, did some of your questions or topics make them code-switch? If they switched into a different language, you can analyze why they did so. (Or, sometimes, why they didn’t.)

(3) Building on academic dialogue You have to use at least five different authors, concepts, readings or frameworks or readings from course material. This means that you can use just one concept from class to explain your discovery and use three additional readings to compare different ethnographic examples, or you can account for your analysis using four different concepts. Either is fine, but you have to make a solid argument, using enough material from class. You can separate the presentation, analysis and intellectual dialogue with other authors (that is, connecting your thesis to the readings, lectures, discussions, etc.) in different paragraphs, but also integrate them together. For example, you can (1) have a paragraph describing what your interviewee said about English and Spanish/Chinese/Belgian etc, (2) have another paragraph establishing your own thesis about how to interpret such ideas, and (3) have other paragraphs relating your thesis to the readings. However, even more efficient would be, maybe, doing all this in one paragraph about each topic in synthetic ways. That is up to you.

(Times New Roman font 12pt, with 1’’ margins, double-spaced,three pages,)