4.6.2 Stage 2:Discourse Analysis of Private Docume...
The second stage aimed to explore the discursive construction of Chinese student’s disciplinary identities in terms of the categories of possible selves, individual identity, and group identity in combined imagined, historical, situated, and social contexts.
4.6.2.1 Appraisal Theory of Personal Recounts
Six Chinese student personal recounts were analysed to explore the individual variables contributing to the construing of possible disciplinary selves in imagination.Initially, I employed Martin and Rose’s (2009) narrative staging, that is, Orientation, Record, and Reorientation, to identify the students’ disciplinary events in personal recounts.As the analysis proceeded, I discovered that there were no explicit signals of shifting of Orientation and Reorientation stages in several of them.It caused difficulty in identifying these two stages.I actually found that the six personal recounts were organised alongside a timeline from the past to the present and/or future.To make the narrative structure more explicit, I thus decided to label narrative stages as Past, Present or Future.Then, I applied Appraisal theory in SFL to interpret the evaluative information in their self-recognition of disciplinary experiences in the current context, by focusing on the disciplinary events, attitudinal alignment and distance, and value orientation.
4.6.2.2 A Sociocultural Explanation of Interviews
In order to understand the developmental process of disciplinary identities construction in historical, situated and social contexts, I employed a sociocultural framework drawn from Vygotsky’s three themes on the interdependence of the individual and the social, as well as some concepts from Wenger’s (1998) three modes of belonging in communities of practice:namely, imagination, engagement, and alignment.The personal recounts were examined for possible disciplinary selves in imagination.
Free talks and semi-structured interviews with the teachers, Chinese and non-Chinese students were descriptively interpreted to examine the Chinese students’ engagement and alignment by accessing imagined, historical, situated and social resources.The subsequent results and discussion were crossreferenced by the second round of interviews with them, as well as interviews with non-Chinese participants.