5.1　Introduction

Before interpreting the discursive and grammatical construction of Chinese students’ disciplinary identities, this chapter strategically examines the situated cultures of the institution and the discipline, and the identities of Chinese students from non-Chinese students’ perspective as a case study.As mentioned earlier, the concept of context in the study is interpreted not only as a specific physical site but also as a higher-order semiotic system along the content plane of language which represents the constituency of physical environment and socio-semiotic events.The repertoire of text acts as both a social constraint and resource of the context, while a collocation of the instances of text mediated by specific contextual and semantic coding orientation is re-instantiated and generalised in the abstraction of orders of social structure, social process and social role.Therefore, the situated culture significantly articulates the coconstruction between context and text.The main question addressed in this chapter is:What are the cultures valued in the current institution and discipline?