you will spend more time describing things that are external to the talk itself: who the speakers are, where they are, what beliefs and customs are important in their lives." Usage In their book Qualitative Communication Research Methods, communications scholars Thomas R. Lindlof and Bryan C. Taylor explain, "Ethnography of communication conceptualizes communication as a continuous flow of information, rather than as a segmented exchange of messages." According to Deborah Cameron, EOC can be thought of as the application of ethnographic methods to the communication patterns of a group. Littlejohn and Foss recall that Dell Hymes suggests that "cultures communicate in different ways, but all forms of communication require a shared code, communicators who know and use the code, a channel, a setting, a message form, a topic, and an event created by transmission of the message." "EOC studies," according to Lindlof and Taylor, "produce highly detailed analysis of communication codes and their moment-to-moment functions in various contexts. In these analyses, speech communities are constituted in local and continuous performances of cultural and moral matters." EOC can be used as a means by which to study the interactions among members of a specific culture or "speech community," which is any group of people that creates and establishes its own speaking codes and norms. Gerry Philipsen explained, "Each community has its own cultural values about speaking and these are linked to judgments of situational appropriateness." The meaning and the understanding of the presence or absence of speech within different communities will vary. Local cultural patterns and norms must be understood to analyze and interpret the appropriateness of speech act within specific communities. Thus, "the statement that talk is not anywhere valued equally in all social contexts suggests a research strategy for discovering and describing cultural or subcultural differences in the value of speaking. Speaking is one among other symbolic resources which are allocated and distributed in social situations according to distinctive culture patterns." Hymes also used EOC to argue against the strong view of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the idea that one's language determines one's cognitive ability. While Hymes believed that one's language affected one's world view, he argued that the extent of that effect depended "on the circumstances of its acquisition, and its place in the linguistic repertoire of a person and a community." The SPEAKING model A model that Hymes developed as a framework for the analysis of a speech