RESEARCH METHOD
Context
The study discussed in this article forms one of several case studies of a larger research project that investigates the nature of L2 literacy in the globalized media of Internet communication, and how new forms of social networking in these electronic media have provided alternative contexts of language development for young immigrants in the US. Understanding how a specific group of learners, identified as immigrants and ESL students in the U.S. school system, use English and other languages in the global contexts of the World Wide Web necessitates a research approach that explores the research participants' activities and experiences in multiple contexts and how these contextualized activities and experiences relate to each other. I started with locating participants in a school site in an urban area on the West Coast of the US, and proceeded to study their activities on the Internet. Using a multi-sited ethnographic approach (Green 1999; Marcus, 1995), I carried out fieldwork in both the school site where the focal youth were learning English in the American school system and the electronic social spaces on the WWW where they were networking through English and other languages with young people around the globe. In addition, I used discourse analysis to study how the participants' language practices are related to the construction of beliefs and identities within their social networks and relationships online.