8.3　Implications for Future Research

With the findings summarised above, it is mostly possible to claim that the outcomes of the current study realise the three aims stated in Section 1.4.First, the proposal of an integrated semiotic and sociocultural theoretical framework enables a comprehensive description and explanation of the multiple factors for examining complicated disciplinary identities construction in the mediated process of group membership affiliation.Second, the integrated social and linguistic methodology explicitly unfolds the process of group membership affiliation realised in the disciplinary practices and values through three modes of imagination, engagement and alignment to community belonging, as well as the performance and negotiation in classroom discourse.This integrated explanatory and analytical framework appropriately solves the tension between self and context, between individual and group, and between interpersonal and intrapersonal interactions.Third, the integrated semiotic and sociocultural analysis offers a better understanding of the ‘Chinese learners’ in the new rising transnational context in China and an application for the insiders who come from different cultures and the outsiders who are working on the international higher education.

However, it needs to be stressed here that the four video-recorded seminars collected from Year 1 to Year 4 are not representative enough to investigate a developmental trajectory of disciplinary discourse use over time, but rather only to manifest the meaning potential of disciplinary identities construction in language development.Despite the variety of data collected, the dataset is small.This is due to the method of case study, but it is necessary to call for an accumulation of more evidence in future research.For example, a longitudinal study for examining the same student participants over the four years would generate a more detailed understanding of language and individual development, as well as increase the validity of the current findings.

Moreover, the ideational and interpersonal analysis of classroom discourse in the current study contains a detailed lexicogrammatical and semantic property, which may be applied in similar research context.Yet with the current appliable development of SFL, the construing of field and tenor should be approached with more enhanced lexicogrammtical and semantic analysis.This can be considered in Professor Jim Martin’s PhD student Hao Jing’s (2015) extended interpretation on field, and the recent attempts on the idea of commitment in interpersonal relationships (cf.Hood, 2004, 2008, 2010; Hood & Martin, 2010; Martin, 2008a, 2010).