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The ability to handle intertextual relations in email is an important component of workplace writing competence that is, for the most part, overlooked in business English classes because of a tendency to treat emails in classroom contexts as independent texts. This study reports on a series of email assignments that required students to read and process a collection of texts before composing emails themselves, with the aim of examining how students dealt with the demands made by the intertextual nature of workplace writing. The findings suggest that the management of multiple texts and their intertextual relations poses considerable challenges for student writers, specifically relating to the amount of information to include, the degree of explicitness needed in referring to other texts, and the management of the dialogue and writer-reader relationship. The study concludes that there is a need to demonstrate to students the centrality of intertextuality and the ways in which it contributes to the coherence of workplace communication. Students need to understand, too, that managing intertextuality is not simply a question of textual manipulation, but of understanding the communicative context and of considering how they want their relationship with the reader to develop.

Linguistic ethnography provides insight into how communication occurs between individuals and institutions, while situating these local actions within wider social, political and historical contexts (Copland & Creese, 2015) and has proven to be a particularly effective tool for developing our understanding of individuals’ lived multilingual realities (see Unamuno, 2014) and societal multilingualism. Turning the ‘reflexive gaze’ that is central to ethnography (Clifford & Marcus, 1986) back onto linguistic ethnography itself, we argue that where complex multilingual interactions are the object of study, more attention must be given to how multilingualism affects each aspect of the process of actually doing linguistic ethnography. In this paper we outline the development of three principles that we put forward as being essential in developing and conducting contemporary linguistic ethnography in multilingual settings. The principles are: 1) Researching multilingually; 2) Researching collaboratively; and 3) Researching responsively.

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