Fostering Cultural Self‑Awareness through Culturally Responsive Teaching: A Case Study of EFL Pedagogy in Chinese Higher Education

Abstract

In many Chinese university English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms, culture is still presented as a collection of factual information regarding festivals, foods, and other visible symbols. Students may recognize these items without being able to explain what they mean or to discuss Chinese cultural experience critically in English. This study develops and examines a localized Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) sequence designed to foster cultural self-awareness and cultural narrative competence through three stages: critically unpacking cultural representations, comparing local and foreign cultural practices, and producing multimodal narratives. A single-group pre-post mixed-methods case study was conducted with 29 first-year engineering students at a local university over a 16-week semester. Evidence came from Likert questionnaires, language tests, classroom worksheets and mind maps, oral presentations, and English vlogs assessed with a three-dimensional rubric for cultural self-awareness, linguistic performance, and multimodal production. The results show the largest gains in cultural self-awareness and multimodal storytelling, with more modest progress in linguistic accuracy. Classroom records suggest that comparative inquiry and hometown-based vlog work helped students move beyond naming cultural objects toward explaining their social and personal significance. These findings provide preliminary, triangulated evidence associated with the localized CRT sequence and illustrate how CRT can be operationalized through comparative inquiry and multimodal cultural narrative production in Chinese university EFL instruction. The study also offers an empirically grounded pedagogical model and a basis for further comparative research on culturally responsive EFL pedagogy.