2.3.4　Group Membership Affiliation

Affiliation is socially realised when an identity ‘becomes a matter of sharing certain experiences, causes, and conduits of communication with others’ (Gee, 2000, p.25).Today, a framed culture is constantly created, negotiated and moulded by individuals when they interact with the others.This causes a struggle to define affiliation in relation to the construction of identities.People are no longer dispersed across either mere local or global contexts.They participate in and share certain practices in different groups.Affiliation consequently becomes an important intermediate meaning-making source and representation for explaining the members’ ‘loyalties’ (Edwards, 2009, p.22) within or across groups, which are assembled at different levels though.

In a community of discipline, affiliation construed in the sense of group membership is a meaningful process that mediates the constructive relationship between individual and context.The previous section has discussed how an individual enacts different parts of self in order to shape a unique individual identity in different groups.They align themselves with the other members in the groups and gain membership through the routinised engagement, in a way of identifying with and being recognised by the others as similar with or different from themselves.To perform and represent themselves as legitimate or appropriate members of the community, individuals consciously negotiate regular disciplinary participation in the sharing of local values and alignment with the others, and play their appropriate roles in the group, like acting on the front stages with different investment of attitudes, beliefs and behaviours.They do so by maintaining the conventionally discipline-bounded performance on the front stage, such as lectures, seminars or meetings, treating and perceiving the other group members as insiders, and also making proximal contributions to the acting in value sharing and interaction.Most likely, the continuity of this acting is identical in the particularities of both discourse forms and activity functions that are imposed by the conventional norms of the contexts, interaction and the individual’s imagination, which index the realisation of group membership affiliation.

The current study introduces the idea of group membership affiliation that stems from an individual’s positive interpersonal and intrapersonal interactions in a group.This minimises the gap between an individual and the context, and helps explain how disciplinary identities construction is realised in a framed system of disciplinary practices and values in a given context.It also helps concretise the process of disciplinary identities construction in the selection of linguistic and interactional features, and the sharing of disciplinary values in a group or different groups.Furthermore, this study argues that identities are created and changed in both context and time.In this sense, the genesis of group membership affiliation in individual and language development helps explore how the heterogeneous Chinese students in a transnational university shape disciplinary identities through the identification of similarities and differences in the groups over time.