8.2 Findings in this Study
This study explores a developmental construction of disciplinary identities in the mediated process of group membership affiliation which is realised through belonging to the community of disciplines realised through imagination, engagement and alignment, as well as performance and negotiation in classroom discourse.As such, the study adopts an integrated sociocultural and semiotic approach to focus on the dynamic process of disciplinary identities construction in a combination of imagined, historical, situated and social contexts.The overall findings reveal that there is certain changed meaning potential of disciplinary identities in the current globalised and internationalised world and such expanded meaning potential supports the emphasis of multiple factors in shaping disciplinary identities in this study.
The findings from the situated institutional culture demonstrate that the global and local culture is promoted, through the descriptive interpretation of public documents and the multi-modal analysis of English and Chinese versions of the university’s website.By analysing the public documents and the teachers’ email responses, the findings from the perspective of situated disciplinary culture show that critical thinking, disciplinary knowledge learning and utilising and theoretical argument ability development are highly valued in common; at the same time, there is a different hierarchy of requirements for the students in accordance with their disciplinary years.Also, it is found that the discipline of IC implements a global-directed curriculum.
The finding from the non-Chinese teachers’ and students’ attitudes to the Chinese students in the context discloses how different interactional experiences with the Chinese construe different impression.This provides more qualitative evidence in what I have argued for new understanding for researching ‘Chinese learners’.Three non-Chinese teachers who are seminar tutors for the six Chinese student participants in this study positively appraise the Chinese students’ learning ability and frame their actual and potential learning development from a historical and contextual perspective.Refusing to take a large Chinese culture into account, they all ascribe the students’ slow learning process to the English language issue.But meanwhile, they do not explicitly evaluate the students’ English ability.
In contrast, all five non-Chinese students with different nationalities negatively appraise the Chinese students’ motivation to use English outside the classroom as the major issue for interaction between them.However, another interesting finding is that this negative attitude generates different understanding and acceptance of the Chinese social and contextual culture.For example, a European student comments that ‘How can you expect people to break the gap between the international cultures, if you don’t go to night club together?’, while the Chinese student interviewees all mention that they have tried to interact with the international students outside the classroom, but this really goes against their life attitudes.However, this tension of large cultural gaps between the international and Chinese students does not explicitly affect how the Chinese students shape their own values and ways of developing disciplinary identities from novice to competent roles.This is reflected in the results as follows.
The findings from the belonging in the community of discipline show that all the six Chinese students shape proximal past, current and future possible disciplinary selves through repeated engagement and positive alignment with the intuitional and disciplinary values.While they increase sense of community belonging from Year 1 to Year 4, they have differentiated developmental processes of gaining membership through belonging in the community of disciplinary.In Year 1, the students Leona and Owen face the difficulty of gaining legitimated membership in both institutional and disciplinary contexts, while in Year 2, Matthew and Catherine develop membership by a struggling adaption to the disciplinary learning and then recognising the valued disciplinary convention.In Year 3 and Year 4, Emma and Nancy most positively appraise and accept the intuitional and disciplinary values.Moreover, some common features are found in shaping these students’ global and local identities, that is, the coexisting of individualism and collectivism, positive future international identity and the establishment of their own values.These results support what has been argued in the current study:the individual disciplinary identities are mediated and developed in and through interpersonal and intrapersonal interaction in groups, and are less affected by the large culture such as Confucianism or collectivism.As such, a community of disciplines as located in the middle position in Figure 3.1 (Chapter 3) is a useful concept to solve the tension among the contexts of institution, of situation and individual, which confucianism enables a more dynamic interpretation of the multiple constructed disciplinary identities.
The findings from lexicogrammatical and semantic performance and negotiation of disciplinary identities in classroom discourse much more explicitly manifest the representation of disciplinary identities in the use of academic language and disciplinary knowledge.At the level of register, the findings show that the Chinese students in the four seminars construe different fields and tenors through the increased use of grammatical units, grammatical density, the reservoir of disciplinary knowledge and speech roles.
The interpretation of ideational and interpersonal meanings at the clause level reinforces an increased trajectory of using language and mobilising disciplinary identities from Year 1 to Year 4.At the classroom level, Year 1 Chinese students produce a bit more grammatical units of clauses and words than the students from the other years, while they use the highest number of elliptical and minor clauses and the fewest clause complexes in expanding meaning potential.At the individual participant level, the Year 4 Chinese students use the highest number and complexity of clause complexes.In the process of re-constructing their reservoir disciplinary knowledge through the use of technicality, abstractions and the nominal groups with classifying and defining elements, the Year 4 students show a higher competence than those in the other three years.
The finding from the speech roles reveals that the Year 4 Chinese students take up more competent continuing and reacting speech roles to negotiate the exchanged information, along with utilising the highest number of turns and moves at the individual level.But it is interesting to find that Year 1 Chinese students generate the highest number of Reacting:support:develop:extend moves in the four texts, which to some extent reflects these students’ active participation in the classroom.