4.7　Scope and Limitations of Data

The current identity research is limited to an integrated systemic-functional linguistic and sociocultural dimension, the selection of participants, and the amount of data.As argued in Chapter 2, rather than a purely psychological or sociological perspective on identity research, a combined linguistic and social orientation will be less arbitrary in investigating how the construal of disciplinary identities interrelates to discursive events from semiotic and sociocultural perspectives.Nevertheless, this is not necessary to completely exclude the uses of other perspectives in research implication and future research direction.

The selection of participants is constrained by the module design and non-Chinese teachers’ full participation willingness.It was explained in Section 4.3 that, at the very early data collection stage, I sent out the consent emails to the non-Chinese teachers in both Faculty of Science Engineering and Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences but failed to collect data in the School of Science, due to its experiment-oriented module design and most non-Chinese teachers’ refusal of video recording.Although some non-Chinese teachers from the School of IC agreed on the data collection, only three teachers allowed me to film their seminars for no more than one time.I again was not able to collect as much classroom discourse data as I wanted.However, the rigorous linguistic analysis and rich sources of other data enabled holistic exploration of the research purpose.