REFORMING FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING MODELS WITH GENAI TO EMPOWER ENGLISH MAJORS TO DISSEMINATE CHINESE CULTURE INTERNATIONALLY
TL;DR
This deep co-creative collaboration substantially enhanced students’ audience awareness and digital storytelling competence, transitioning them from cultural knowledge presenters to culturally sensitive narrators oriented toward international audiences.
Abstract
The integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) into foreign language education in China has predominantly focused on language skills courses and GenAI’s textual function, leaving the multimodal potential of GenAI-enhanced foreign language culture courses for cultivating English-majored students' competence of disseminating Chinese culture internationally underexplored. To address this gap, this study constructs and implements a multimodal human-GenAI collaborative teaching model featuring teacher-student-GenAI triadic collaboration and a three-stage progressive framework within the undergraduate course A Comparison between Chinese and Foreign Cultures. Centering on Chinese culture short video production as the core task, the study employs a qualitative case study approach, drawing on multiple data sources including students' draft and final videos, GenAI collaboration worksheets, classroom evaluation records, reflection journals, and retrospective interviews. The findings reveal that students initially treated GenAI merely as a superficial reference and error-correction tool, resulting in macro narratives, unoriginal visuals, and ethnocentric perspectives. Following peer evaluation, teacher feedback, and a second round of deep GenAI collaboration, students underwent significant transformations: they shifted to micro narrative perspective in their storytelling, integrated AI-generated visual innovations and incorporated comparative Chinese-foreign cultural perspectives. This deep co-creative collaboration substantially enhanced students’ audience awareness and digital storytelling competence, transitioning them from cultural knowledge presenters to culturally sensitive narrators oriented toward international audiences. This study provides practical implications for GenAI-enabled foreign language culture education and the cultivation of foreign language talents with the capacity of digital storytelling and dissemination of Chinese culture to international community.