A Study on the Pathways to Cultivating Chinese Cultural Awareness in College English Education

Abstract

As global public discourse has undergone tremendous shifts in recent years, college English teaching is required to adopt the “value-oriented guidance” teaching framework to deliver multiple teaching effects simultaneously. Under this paradigm, college English teaching is not supposed to stop at the transmission of language knowledge. The ideological and political education should also be woven into the explanation of teaching content, and teachers are also encouraged to set up comparative reading tasks that bring Chinese and Western texts into dialogue, while productive activities should be designed so that students can express their own views in English. Digital materials can also serve as a way to extend and enrich what is learned in class. Against this background, this study builds on widely used college English textbooks and focuses on units that contain clear Chinese cultural elements as the main research object. The cultural and language content inside these units is also examined carefully, and a set of practical classroom teaching steps is then worked out on this basis. The proposed approach links everyday language-learning tasks with cultural understanding and expression, so students are able to improve their cross-cultural communication skills step by step in real situations. More importantly, it helps students develop a deeper understanding of and emotional attachment to Chinese culture. Through continuous language learning and opportunities to express Chinese culture in English, students can strengthen their sense of cultural recognition and eventually cultivate a stable and lasting cultural identity.