1.1　Motivation for This Study

This study explores the linguistic and social construction of Chinese students’ disciplinary identities in a UK-based university in Chinese Mainland, the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC).Examining in detail the dynamic construction of Chinese students’ disciplinary identities over the four years in the School of International Communications from an integrated perspective, this ongoing study investigates the individual, linguistic, historical, situated and social factors that combine to develop disciplinary identities in the mediated process of group membership affiliation in the community.By drawing on some concepts from Systemic Functional Linguistics, sociocultural theory, and Hyland’s idea of proximity (2012), the study introduces the idea of group membership affiliation to explore how far interpersonal and intrapersonal interactions in groups mediate the developmental construction of Chinese students’ disciplinary identities in registerial variation of texts and reservoir context (cf.Halliday, 1978, 1994; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014; Hasan, 1992, 1995, 1996, 1999, 2005, 2009; Matthiessen, 2003, 2007; Martin, 1992, 2006, 2008a, 2010; Zhang, 2018).

Discursive construction of Chinese learners’ identities is pervasive in the literature associated with second language acquisition, but the current study is more concerned with the ways in which the tertiary students in this transnational university construe disciplinary identities in and through the sociocultural practices and values gained through belonging (Wenger, 1998) in the community, as well as the semiotic performance and negotiation in academic discourse in seminars.Although there is a rising number of transnational universities in China, less comprehensive research has been done to explore their contexts.Among the studies on transnational universities, the example of UNNC is the most cited model under such an examination (e.g., Hemsley-Brown & Oplatka, 2006; Huang, 2007; Osborne et al., 2014; Phillips et al., 2009; Rebecca, 2008; Wilkings & Huisman, 2012; Yang, 2008).This university is the first independently run Sino-foreign cooperation university approved by the Chinese government in 2004.By 2016, the university had over 6,000 domestic and international students and 600 staff from more than 60 countries worldwide.Nevertheless, there is very little research on how this international context looks like to be and how its members with multicultural backgrounds enact their roles in the context.

To date, a large amount of research on ‘Chinese learners’ unfortunately focuses on the Chinese ‘large culture’ (Holliday, 1999), and yet explores the developmental trajectory of Chinese learners’ identities construction in the current globalised and internationalised world.This study therefore emphasises the multiplicity of identity and argues that identity is constructed in and through the interactions with self and others in context.Becoming a strong economy globally, China seeks a share of effective strategies of international education for the citizens.When people consciously identify, recognise and accept these educational strategies, changes emerge.Therefore, the alternative examination of the ‘Chinese learners’ in newly established contexts is needed.Specifically, for the current site of UNNC, it is more significant to assess how Chinese students position themselves in such an educational context that features a mixture of global and local culture.