During his time at the University of Hawaii, he also worked with linguist Li Fang-Kuei on a series of Chipewyan texts that Li had recorded in collaboration with storyteller François Mandeville during a visit to Fort Chipewyan, Alberta in 1928.
Scollon's work with Li Fang-Kuei on the Mandeville stories led to a period of fieldwork in Fort Chipewyan in 1976–1977.
During this period, the Scollons became interested in the ways in which different interactive styles—in the case of Fort Chipewyan, people socialized to an oral narrative discourse encountering people socialized to a discourse grounded in literacy and the European Enlightenment—can lead to misunderstanding and discrimination.
He also taught in the education program, where in addition to working with education students face to face in a traditional classroom setting, he (together with Suzanne Wong Scollon) developed methods to conduct courses by email and audioconference with students distributed across several of the University of Alaska's satellite facilities.
This triangle of contrasting discourse systems was the grounding for the methodological work Scollon focused on during his period on the faculty of City University of Hong Kong, from 1992 to 1998.