7.1　Introduction

The analysis so far has explored the valued disciplinary practices and conventions mediating Chinese students’ participation and attitudes along a developmental trajectory.This chapter continues the discussion of how the Chinese students from Year 1 to Year 4 semiotically perform and negotiate the processes of disciplinary identities from apprenticeship to competent interactants in classroom academic discourse, in order to answer the final research question:How are the Chinese students’ disciplinary identities represented in classroom discourse through similarities and differences? These processes involve the ideational meanings of grammatical units, grammatical intricacy and Thing types in the nominal group, as well as interpersonal meanings of speech structures with disciplinary knowledge construction in the use of language.The discussion focuses on how far the Chinese students mobilise the semiotic resources of clause complexity, abstraction, technicality, nominal groups with defining and classifying elements in relational processes and speech roles at both individual participant and classroom levels.The detailed description and explanation of these grammatical and contextual features are available in Chapter 3 and as below.