Ethnomethodology of written discourse: An analytical model for treating written discourse as ongoing social action.

Ethnomethodology has been influential in many social science fields, including and especially applied linguistics, where conversation analysis is a major subfield for analyzing oral data. Nevertheless, ethnomethodology can also be—and has been—fruitfully applied to written discursive data, using its tools and methods to describe in detail how written texts are assembled and reflexively used, as members' methods, for doing and displaying social actions. This paper proposes an open analytical model to capture existing ethnomethodological analyses of written discourse and create a more transparent and replicable protocol for new analyses. I reconstruct ethnomethodology as set of assumptions and principles, review seminal research that used these principles to analyze written discourse, and present the master concept of "active text" that encapsulates them. I then construct a hierarchical prospective-retrospective model to formalize the methods used in ethnomethodology of written discourse. I use the model to reconstruct the analytical methods of two papers to show how it can be used for transparency and replication. The discussion section covers modelling in qualitative applied linguistics and ethnomethodology, and ends with some conclusions. • Ethnomethodology has a long relationship with discourse analysis, but focused on oral registers. • Ethnomethodology can be conceptualized a set of ontological and epistemological assumptions and principles. • A formalized and open analytical model can be used to apply ethnomethodology to written discursive data. • A model can help make ethnomethodological analysis of discursive data easier to apply and more replicable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]