Blurred genres and fuzzy identities in Hong Kong public discourse: Foundational ethnographic issues in the study of reading

This paper reports a series of ethnographic studies conducted in Hong Kong to address the problem of divergence between school-based genres and genres of public discourse, with the goal of laying a foundation for addressing t he question of what genres of discourse we should be teaching. Our main con cern is to locate our students' writing-within the highly complex matrix of genres of public discourse in Hong Kong. Based on the concept supported by our research findings that reading is a diverse, heterogeneous and changin g social practice, a complex and interdiscursive research methodology has b een employed in the project. Using four interpretive methodologies: genre a nalysis, ethnography of communication, contrastive rhetoric, and interactiv e sociolinguistic or ethno-methodological analysis, we have completed five studies comprising a participant-observation study, a pager survey, a scene survey, an event survey and a readership study. These studies show the com plexity of relationships among the participants within the audience and in relationship to the texts of public discourse. The results, thus, lead us t o the discussion of five key theoretical issues: (1) audience roles, (2) si tes of engagement, (3) reading as social practice, (4) implied readership a nd (5) multilingual code mixing. Regarding practices of our students, our s tudies indicate that their non-school world of discourse practices is highl y intertextual, polyvocal and polyfocal. Our research suggests that many of our traditional academic concepts of genres and communication are in need of revision and focusing pedogogical goals on fixed genres may limit our st udents' productivity.