Camilla Vásquez

Reconceptualising Fieldwork in a Netnography of an Online Community of English Language Teachers.

Netnography is an approach to studying online communities and cultures to arrive at an ethnographic understanding. Drawing on our own experiences and methodological choices in a netnography of a multi-site online community of practice of English language teachers, known as Webheads in Action, this article illustrates how ethnographic fieldwork practices change when carried out with communities that exist primarily online. Focusing on illustrative examples from our 10-month netnographic fieldwork data, we argue that concepts of ‘the field, participant observation, interviews, and researcher survival skills’ are experienced in fundamentally different ways in netnography as opposed to in-person ethnography, which calls for reconceptualisation of fieldwork practices in online communities because of the dynamics of online environments and the use of web-based technologies.

Raising teachers’ awareness about corrective feedback through research replication

This article reports on a case study that examined the evolving thoughts and beliefs about corrective feedback of graduate students in applied linguistics, who were enrolled in a semester-long second language acquisition (SLA) course. Working in groups, the graduate students (students in an MA-TESL program, and doctoral students in a related program; a combination of practicing and prospective language teachers), conducted a partial replication of Lyster and Ranta’s (1997) study of corrective feedback in some of their own ESL classes. The present study was designed to discover the extent to which graduate students’ participation in this classroom-based research replication would contribute to a re-examination of their ideas, thoughts, or beliefs about corrective feedback. The replication project was conceptualized by the researchers as serving as a bridge between formal research and practical inquiry (Richardson, 1994). Analysis of multiple data sources (e.g. questionnaires, journal entries, a group interview) indicated that a number of students’ ideas about error correction shifted throughout the semester. In particular, after participating in the research replication project, many students’ comments revealed a decreased emphasis on the affective dimension of error correction, and a more sophisticated understanding of corrective feedback, as well as an appreciation for the relationship between corrective feedback, student uptake, and error type. In addition to themes of shifts in awareness about the complex nature of corrective feedback, the analysis further identified possible changes in future teaching practice, different attitudes toward research, and the appropriation of terminology pertaining to teaching.

Feedback in teacher education: mentor discourse and intern perceptions

Giving and receiving feedback are essential activities in student teaching. This paper explores the strategies that mentors adopted in giving post-observation feedback to the interns in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and these teaching interns’ perceptions of the feedback they received. The discourse analysis of six post-observation meetings that involved six mentors and five MA student interns shows how the mentors engaged the interns in the interaction and made their feedback more acceptable to these teaching interns. The mentors’ strategies include the questioning techniques, as well as patterns in the delivery of compliments, criticisms and suggestions. Analysis of the recorded mentors’ feedback and follow-up interviews with the interns reveal that they appreciated many of the mentors’ strategies in giving feedback. The paper concludes with conditions which seem to foster constructive post-observation interactions.

If nearly all Airbnb reviews are positive, does that make them meaningless?

Peer-to-peer business models rely on interpersonal communication for their success. In this article, we focus on Airbnb – an exemplar of the so-called ‘sharing economy’ – and more specifically, on Airbnb’s reciprocal reviewing system, which enables both hosts and guests to review one another. Our study takes a computer-assisted, qualitative approach to explore linguistic patterns of evaluation in Airbnb reviews. Our findings indicate that Airbnb reviews tend to comprise a very restricted set of linguistic resources, establishing the site’s norm of highly positive commentary, which in turn makes Airbnb reviews, on the surface, appear to be quite similar to one another. However, a micro-analytic comparison of positive reviews reveals that less-than-positive experiences are sometimes communicated using more nuanced, subtle cues. This study contributes to existing literature on electronic word of mouth in the tourism industry by highlighting how evaluation is communicated, while simultaneously responding to hospitality scholars’ calls for analyses which extend beyond the star ratings and also take into account consumers’ constructions of experience in the review texts themselves.

“I Am Not a Foodie…”: Culinary Capital in Online Reviews of Michelin Restaurants

This article adds to the growing literature on foodie discourse, by providing an analysis of amateur reviews of one-star Michelin restaurants sampled from two different websites, OpenRice and Yelp, which reflect two different geocultural contexts: Hong Kong and New York City. We demonstrate that online restaurant reviews provide a means through which individuals can display their culinary capital—to an audience who is likely to share similar interests—as they establish their expertise on matters such as authenticity, taste, quality, and the perceived value of their dining experiences. Furthermore, we explore how issues of social class and access to economic capital are implicated in user-generated reviews of this category of restaurants. By asserting their right to participate in a larger conversation about Michelin standards, online reviewers place themselves on equal footing with culinary elites and professional food reviewers. Consequently, we argue that new media genres such as online reviews challenge well-established hierarchies in food culture, yet at the same time, they also reproduce some existing forms of culinary capital.

A Comparative multimodal analysis of restaurant reviews from two geographical contexts

In this article, the authors offer a comparative approach to the analysis of a popular internet genre – user-generated restaurant reviews – sampled from two different websites (OpenRice and Yelp), which have emerged from two different geographic contexts (Hong Kong and the US). Their investigation reveals both similarities and differences of in terms of review format, content discussed and the use of several semiotic resources, such as the posting of photographs, the use of emoticons and emoji, and the expressive use of orthography and punctuation. The authors demonstrate that, while many of the formal properties of the genre are quite similar, some variations in review content may reflect underlying cultural differences. Furthermore, they show not only how the website’s architecture can either constrain or encourage the use (or non-use) of particular semiotic resources, but also suggest that other variables (i.e. orthographic systems, review community norms) may interact with medium factors.

My life has changed forever

New parodic genres have emerged across diverse forms of digital media. Sometimes these parodies take the form of mock “narratives of personal experience,” with authors drawing on a range of discursive resources to perform particular identities and in doing so, to create texts written from imagined perspectives. In this article, I focus on parodies of user-generated product reviews on Amazon. For over a decade, Amazon users have contributed thousands of parodies of reviews written about real products. This analysis focuses on a sample from a data set of 100 parodic Amazon reviews written about five different products (which have become the targets of a large number of parody reviews), and demonstrates how authors perform self-disclosure to construct fictional personae. I demonstrate how these discursively-constructed narrative identities are central to the ensuing and improbable narrative events represented in the parodic texts.