ABSTRACT
With recent sociopolitical events in the Arab world and the rise of social media, the need for further communication between Arabic language teaching and discourse-level sociolinguistic considerations is greater than ever. A focus on ‘discourse’ in online settings means that we need to re-orient towards a new sociolinguistics paradigm in which identity is at the core of the learning experience. This chapter suggests the utility of online ethnography as a tool to approach identity and discourse in the ASL classroom. This methodology is consistent with a vision of language as a set of “situated resources” (Blommaert 2010: 43), the analysis of which requires the adoption of new tools of investigation, described by Blommaert (2010: 5) as a “sociolinguistics of mobility”.
