2.4 The Need for an Integrated Analytical Framewor...
The above section has reviewed and discussed a variety of the perspectives, approaches and scopes of the research on identity, and also conceptualised the construction of disciplinary identities in social and linguistic ranges.What has been discussed so far conveys a central idea that identity is a multi-faceted representation of a meaning-making process which bridges the co-embedding of self-and-social relation across time and context.The conceptual and explanatory framework of disciplinary identities construction in a community of discipline proposes and confirms that there is a constructive relationship between language user and context.
The linguistic, social and psychological perspectives still dominate the identity research; however, the ambiguity and lack of integrative perspective on the modern explanation of multiplicity of identities and the process of identities construction cause a problem.As mentioned in Chapter 1, the issue of identity has become important due to people’s mobility across local, national or transnational regions.The current study therefore attempts to explore an alternative understanding of Chinese students’ disciplinary identities construction in a less examined context, that is, a transnational university in China.The relevant literature reveals that a comprehensive understanding of disciplinary identities and the constructive process have not been explicitly defined and explained in the above-mentioned identity research fields.With this concern, this study locates identity research in the field of linguistics, and argues for an integrated approach to investigating the multiplied construction of disciplinary identities in both social and linguistic realisation of possible selves, individual identity and group identity.
Yet the conceptualisation of disciplinary identities construction in groups entails a necessity to move beyond a conceptual model of describing the dynamic process of construction in a methodological approach and an analysis framework of interpreting how and why the multiple categories of disciplinary identities are constructed and represented in the use of language and context.It has been discussed that there is a need to seek an integrated perspective on disciplinary identities construction regarding four key issues:namely, social phenomena, linguistic phenomena, interaction, and context.Among various social and linguistic approaches to addressing these issues, SFL and sociocultural theory are adopted because they offer systematic and compatible perspectives and frameworks for explaining and analysing how the allocation of disciplinary practices, personal imagination and ways of interaction contribute to the performing and negotiating of disciplinary identities in groups, mediating the relation between individual and context through the process of affiliation.This will be further elaborated in Chapter 3.