Fostering a Meta-cultural Competence for Chinese Students: A Cultural Discourse Analysis Perspective

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-563-8_8How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Cultural Conceptualisation; Meta-cultural Competence; Cultural Event Schema; Intercultural Communication

Abstract

Studies conducted around cultural representation in Chinese College ELT textbooks have indicated that they are not predominantly designed for fostering students’ intercultural communicative competences. In this view, this study explored how the currently used 3rd edition of the Chinese ELT textbook series NHCE demonstrated Chinese cultural conceptualisation of the English language and contributed to the development of students’ meta-cultural competence within both domestic and international contexts. It focused on the cultural conceptual features of Chinese values and themes embedded in the cultural content of New Horizon College English (NHCE) and explored how these features were presented and contextualised in NHCE and further impacted on students’ cultivation of meta-cultural competence. This study employed content analysis and cultural discourse analysis to support the discussion of cultural embodiments between images, data, and texts to investigate two research questions, i.e., i) What evidence of cultural event schemas demonstrates Chinese nativisation and conceptualisation of the English language in the NHCE textbook series? and ii) How may the identified evidence impact on the development of Chinese students’ meta-cultural competence? A semiotic analysis approach was adopted for this study to examine the indexical linkage between texts and images in generating potential Chinese cultural conceptualisation meanings. This study underscored the value of integrating the cultural linguistic knowledge of students’ mother language into ELT materials, supporting future textbook writers in designing culturally rich content that cultivates students’ intercultural competences in a real-life scenario.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Yu Jiang
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/04/28
TI  - Fostering a Meta-cultural Competence for Chinese Students: A Cultural Discourse Analysis Perspective
BT  - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference of Research on Language 2025 (IROLE 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 72
EP  - 89
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-563-8_8
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-563-8_8
ID  - Jiang2026
ER  -