1 Introduction

This section introduces the course "Digital Storytelling: Telling China's Stories in English" offered by Beijing Foreign Studies University, which aims to cultivate college students' ability to disseminate Chinese culture and enhance China's international discourse power. The course integrates multidisciplinary knowledge, enabling students to spread Chinese culture through producing English videos. It emphasizes the affinity and appeal of personal stories, requiring students to collect authentic stories from daily life, engage in practical processes, and develop a sense of national identity and global perspective. Course practice revealed that whether students possess intercultural audience awareness is a key determinant of story quality. Through a case study, this research explores the expansive learning process of college students' intercultural audience awareness, helping teachers understand its developmental complexity and challenges, and guiding students to gradually achieve their goals.

2 Intercultural Audience Awareness and Expansive Learning

This section discusses the intercultural audience awareness required for college students when telling China's stories in English, distinguishing between generative and presupposed intercultural audience awareness. It analyzes how to cultivate this awareness from three dimensions: attitude, knowledge, and behavior. It emphasizes that storytellers must balance audience needs and self-expression, translating attitude and knowledge into actionable behavior. Additionally, it introduces Finnish scholar Engeström's concept of expansive learning, proposing that through course participation, students can resolve contradictions, update attitudes and cognition, and achieve expansive learning in intercultural audience awareness.

3 Research Design

This section presents a longitudinal case study design, tracking a second-year Arabic major student, Huayang, over 16 weeks of course participation. The study employs purposive and convenience sampling, collecting Huayang's assignments, reflective journals, and story videos, as well as supplementary data such as interviews and course materials. Content analysis is used to analyze the data based on the three elements of intercultural audience awareness (attitude, knowledge, and behavior), constructing three developmental stages of college students' intercultural audience awareness and exploring the mediating role of teacher-student interaction patterns. Two researchers jointly coded the data, ensuring credibility and validity through multiple rounds of cross-verification and member checking.

4 Developmental Changes in Intercultural Audience Awareness

This chapter describes Huayang's developmental changes in intercultural audience awareness during the "Digital Storytelling: Telling China's Stories in English" course through three learning events. Initially, Huayang pursued grand narratives, unaware of intercultural audiences. However, under teacher guidance, he began reconsidering the connection between China's stories, himself, and the audience. In the second learning event, Huayang attempted to create a neighborhood story but struggled due to a lack of skills to make it understandable to the audience. Teacher feedback prompted him to recognize the importance of cultural differences and reevaluate his story from the audience's perspective. In the third learning event, Huayang sought to move and influence intercultural audiences by telling a family story. He adjusted the focus to reflect changes in understanding familial love and incorporated culturally distinctive Chinese elements. Teacher feedback helped him identify the story's shortcomings and refine its climax to better convey the theme. Huayang's intercultural audience awareness significantly improved during this process, as he began valuing and embracing audience needs while balancing the dual goals of sharing personal stories and disseminating Chinese values. In terms of knowledge and skills, he applied narrative structure and language expression techniques, using universal themes like family love to connect with audiences and local cultural values to influence them, facilitating cross-cultural communication and negotiation.

5 Discussion

Through Huayang's learning case, this section explores the developmental process of college students' intercultural audience awareness. By continuously identifying, analyzing, and resolving contradictions, Huayang achieved progress in attitude, knowledge, and behavior. This process resembles the stages of intercultural sensitivity development, including denial, minimization, and integration. Expansive learning enables students to transcend presupposed content and create new knowledge and practices. Teacher and student activities serve as mediating tools, fostering the development of intercultural audience awareness. Teachers encourage students to identify contradictions through gradual withdrawal, while students transition from passive to active engagement, flexibly employing strategies to integrate self-expression and audience needs. The formation of intercultural audience awareness requires long-term development in attitude, cognition, and action.

6 Conclusion

This chapter summarizes the expansive learning process of college students' intercultural audience awareness in the "Digital Storytelling: Telling China's Stories in English" course. The study finds that students progress from recognizing intercultural audiences to adapting narratives to audience expectations and finally guiding and influencing audiences with local knowledge and values, demonstrating continuous expansion and deepening of awareness. Teachers and students jointly identify and analyze contradictions, implementing strategies to resolve them, thereby driving the transformation and reconstruction of the course learning activity system and generating new forms and practices of intercultural audience awareness. For innovative courses, teachers and researchers face the tension between student autonomy and learning efficiency. This study suggests that future courses could focus on selecting emotionally resonant themes, improving the conversion rate of theoretical knowledge, and providing authentic cross-cultural dissemination channels for student videos. Due to space limitations, this study presents the developmental process of intercultural audience awareness through a typical case. Future research should validate its developmental patterns with larger samples and diverse contexts.