6.1　Introduction

This chapter explores the dynamic construction process of Chinese students’ disciplinary identities in this mixed global and local context, bridging the contextual information in the previous chapters and the detailed linguistic analysis of the Chinese students’ classroom discourse use in Chapter 7.The main questions addressed in this chapter are:What are the contextual values and disciplinary practices mediating the Chinese students’ current participation? To what extent do these factors affect their disciplinary identities construction? Both individual and social forces of disciplinary identities construction in individual and language development are emphasised in the current study.For this reason, as discussed in previous chapters, Wenger’s (1998) three modes of belonging in the community—imagination, engagement and alignment enable a specific consideration of the imagined, historical, situated and social dimensions of development.

This chapter analyses the data collected from the six personal recounts of the six Chinese student participants, as well as the free talks and two rounds of interviews, with a close-grained examination of the cases to identify the proximity of possible disciplinary selves and meaning potential of practices and values in the community.The six Chinese students from different years are Leona and Owen (Year 1), Matthew and Catherine (Year 2), Emma (Year 3) and Nancy (Year 4).Six personal recounts are analysed by the Appraisal theory to investigate how the relation between the self and the context presupposes the construction of disciplinary identities in the attitudinal resources, by drawing on the meanings of discipline-related ‘possible selves’ (e.g., Markus & Nurius, 1986) and ‘proximity’ (Hyland, 2012) as a methodology.The idea of possible disciplinary selves, as a starting point to explore the disciplinary identities in the research, helpfully articulates the individual’s belonging to the community through proximal or distant interpersonal and intrapersonal interaction with the contexts over time.Furthermore, the descriptive interpretation of interviews examines the engagement and alignment in membership development.Moreover, the similarity and variation across participants (Gibson & Brown, 2009) are compared to examine the links between the self-construction and context of culture.The integrated analysis of the context, the students’ disciplinary events in the field of discipline, and their relevant attitudinal evaluation of the field then provide a useful methodology to investigate the ways in which individuals participate in groups.