Procedure
Over an eight-month period from January to August, 2001, I used participant observation, in-depth
interviews, and textual documentation to gather data on Yu Qing's and Tsu Ying's computer experiences
and activities, their personal backgrounds, and their schooling experiences. I visited their classrooms,
"hung out" with them in the cafeteria and other places in the school, and observed them doing class
assignments and chatting online in the computer lab. The computer lab became a place where I frequently
sat beside the girls to observe their participation in the bilingual chat room. In addition, I gathered data
from my own exploration of the technical set-up, demographics, and social dynamics of the chat room.
Field notes were taken during my participant observation in both the school site and on the Internet.
I conducted eight tape-recorded interviews with the girls that lasted approximately one and a half hours
each, to learn about their computer use, progress and reflection on their Internet activities, experiences at
school, experiences learning English, and other relevant background information such as immigration,
family, and living situation. Records of the public exchanges in the Hong Kong chat room were made
through a computer program that captured the screen display of the chat room. Approximately 20 hours of
chat room exchanges were recorded and used for analysis.
Besides using inductive thematic analysis to identify patterns in the field notes, interview transcripts, and
chat room data, I adopted the analytical tools of interactional sociolinguistics to examine the discursive
and rhetorical elements of the chat room dialogues. Developed from the pioneering work of scholars such
as Goffman (e.g., 1975, 1981) and Gumperz (e.g., 1982a, 1982b), interactional sociolinguistics is an
approach to discourse that seeks to uncover the cultural assumptions and social differentiation produced
and reproduced in people's everyday conduct through the microanalysis of verbal interactions.
Specifically, I analyzed how code-switching between English and romanized Cantonese in the chat room
is used to index the social alignments and cultural assumptions of the participants in their online
exchanges, and the role of code-switching in the construction of a collective ethnic identity.