This exploratory paper poses the following question: how has ethnography been used as logic of inquiry in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) research in Brazil? In order to start some discussion in this respect, a corpus comprised of thirty seven MA abstracts available at the online Bank of Theses of CAPES (Research and Graduate Teaching Support Coordination) was used to investigate how ethnography has been utilized as an orienting procedure in Brazilian research on EFL. The keywords language teaching, ethnography and ethnographic were chosen so as to select abstracts that were related to ethnography and language teaching, either as logic of inquiry, or as a methodological tool for collecting and analyzing data. The preliminary results have suggested that ethnography has mostly been adopted as an instrument for analysis rather than logic of inquiry, which (i) allows for the misunderstanding commonly arisen from research in this field of investigation and consequently (ii) points out that Foreign Language Teaching and Learning research should take into account more focused and clarified methodological designs under the umbrella of Qualitative Research.
foreign language teaching and learning research; ethnography as logic of inquiry; qualitative research
