6.5　Summary

This chapter outlines the analysis and discussion done to six Chinese student participants’ personal recounts and interviews for exploring individual disciplinary identities development through community belonging in groups in combined imagined, historical, situated and social dimensions.It thus emphasises disciplinary identities construction in the relationship between self and context, and between individuals and groups.First, I have discussed the concept of possible selves and semiotic experience, and the analytical tools and procedures of personal recounts are discussed in Section 6.3.Second, I have examined the narrative accounts of possible disciplinary self development in three modes of belonging, namely, imagination, engagement and alignment, by analysing the similarities and differences in these Chinese students’ disciplinary experiences.In Section 6.4, I have identified the discursive construction of individual possible disciplinary selves in personal recounts regarding attitude and experience in imagination by using Martin and Rose’s (2009) genre stages and Appraisal theory.

The findings show that although the six Chinese students increase a sense of belonging to the context of institution from year 1 to year 4, they have differentiated developmental processes of gaining membership through belonging in the community of a discipline.That is, Year 1 students Leona and Owen who participate in both language and discipline-related learning courses face the difficulty of gaining legitimated membership in both institutional and disciplinary contexts, while Year 2 students Matthew and Catherine develop their membership from the stage of struggling to that of recognising the valued disciplinary convention.For Year 3 and Year 4 students Emma and Nancy, they mostly positively appraise and accept the intuitional and disciplinary values.Moreover, it is found that these students shape both global and local identities in the current transnational university, which is particularly represented in the coexisting of individualism and collectivism, positive future international identity and the establishment of one’s own values.These results support what has been proposed in the current study that the individual disciplinary identities are mediated and developed in and through interpersonal and intrapersonal interaction with different contexts of institution, discipline and individuals in the groups, instead of merely affected by the large culture such as Confusion or collectivism.As mentioned earlier, the most salient manifestation of disciplinary identities is in the use of language; therefore, the next chapter will move to the SFL analysis of disciplinary identities in classroom academic discourse.