4.1　An Integrated Research Design

Chapters 2 and 3 reviewed the literature, the theoretical and analytical framework of the relation between context, language and disciplinary identities construction, and introduced the idea of group membership affiliation from an integrated social and linguistic perspective.In line with the three research questions listed in Table 4.1 below, the current research constructs the research exploration from both theoretical and methodological dimensions with the disciplinary identities construction as an analytical lens to cultural phenomena in a given context.The emphasis on exploratory features results in the current research design that is qualitative in nature and case study in style.While adopting grammatical analysis as the predominant tool and a sociocultural model as a complementary dimension, this study draws an integrated paradigm of data collection.This chapter demonstrates an overview of methodological issues concerning the selection of setting and participants, process of data collection, data transcription and translation, data analysis procedures and tools, scope and limitations of data, and the issues of ethics, validity and reliability.The summary of methodology is shown in Table 4.1.

Table 4.1　Summary of methodology

Before collecting classroom discourse data, at the first stage the information about the various situational factors in shaping the cultures of institution and discipline in the current context was gathered.It not only provided a basic understanding of how the physical and semiotic context was constructed concerning disciplinary events and value orientation in this specific context, but also presupposed how individual students enacted and developed their disciplinary identities through participation in different groups at the second stage.Public documents were synthesised and described to provide a basic understanding of what the physical site and its embedded cultures and conventions appear to be.Free talks with the insiders and the student written personal recounts identified each case of the six Chinese student participants’ biographical background, how their disciplinary actions, feelings, and values shaped possible disciplinary selves in similar and different ways.The two rounds of semi-structured interviews cross-referenced sources of data linked with the first and the third stages to obtain as much rich individual, historical, contextual, and social information from the student interviewees as possible, and meanwhile to evidence the intermediate construction of context, text and disciplinary identities conditioned in the culture.Finally, the data of the Chinese students’ classroom discourse enabled an observable manifestation for examining how they perform and negotiate disciplinary roles in the classroom.