1　Introduction

This section elaborates on the important mission of college English education in cultivating international communication talents under the new era background, pointing out that the *Understanding Contemporary China: College English Integrated Course* released in 2025 marks a new stage of the "Three Entries" initiative, and that this textbook can be integrated with existing excellent college English textbooks to consolidate quality resources; in response to the practical dilemma of tight class hours, four strategies are proposed—theme integration, skill integration, task integration, and feature integration—and examples are drawn from *Understanding Contemporary China* and *New College English* to provide practical references for building college English courses with rich connotations and open diversity.

2　Integration Strategies

This section systematically elaborates on four core strategies for the integrated use of college English textbooks. The theme integration strategy emphasizes the organic integration of units with similar themes in both textbooks, designing content-driven teaching tasks around common topics, and constructing a teaching system that combines cognitive expansion, language enhancement, and intercultural understanding. This strategy focuses on the relevance, systematicity, and continuity of content, helping students deepen their cognition within familiar topic frameworks. Taking the theme of "China's Development" as an example, it demonstrates in detail the integration path of *New College English* B2U1 with *Understanding Contemporary China* B2U1, B1U1, and other units, and provides a complete teaching plan covering 4 lessons (8 class hours), including four stages: experience activation, past-present contrast expression, data expression, and knowledge integration, aiming to guide students to deeply understand the multi-dimensional characteristics of Chinese modernization, master core language skills, and enhance intercultural understanding and international communication literacy. During implementation, it is necessary to avoid the single perspective of emphasizing China while neglecting foreign countries; full advantage should be taken of *Understanding Contemporary China*'s feature of providing Chinese and foreign materials around the same theme to guide students in conducting cross-cultural comparisons.

The skill integration strategy focuses on similar core language skills in both textbooks, designing teaching activities around common skill training objectives, and achieving skill transfer and capability enhancement in diverse contexts. This strategy is more flexible and particularly suitable for breakthroughs in core language skills and cross-text application. The Read and think/write modules in *New College English* and the Intercultural communication skill modules in *Understanding Contemporary China* are highly compatible in skill orientation, providing a solid foundation for integration. Taking the skill of "breaking stereotypes" as an example, it demonstrates a 4-lesson integration plan that guides students to identify and reflect on cultural stereotypes through travel-related contexts, master neutral expression strategies, and enhance intercultural communication awareness and critical thinking abilities. This strategy typically uses one textbook as the main resource and the other as supplementary, achieving reinforcement and expansion of skill training without changing the unit framework of the main textbook.

The task integration strategy organically integrates comprehensive tasks from both textbooks to design high-level output tasks that combine interest and contemporary relevance, critical thinking and ideological-political education, using tasks as traction and output as the goal to achieve deep integration of language ability, cultural awareness, and value guidance. Specific implementation can adopt the "transfer + recreation" strategy, retaining the original task structure of *New College English* while introducing materials from *Understanding Contemporary China* that reflect contemporary trends and Chinese experience. Typical cases include integrating the business analysis training from *New College English* B3U3 with materials from *Understanding Contemporary China* B2U3 on the construction of the Hainan Free Trade Port to design the task "Pitching a business plan in Hainan Free Trade Port"; and integrating the healthy living theme from *New College English* B3U6 with the poverty alleviation content from *Understanding Contemporary China* B2U2 to design the role-play interview task "Healthy villages, healthy lives." This strategy helps achieve effective advancement from language knowledge to comprehensive ability and from classroom learning to real communication, but due to high task complexity, it is more suitable for implementation at advanced stages for student groups with strong independent learning and comprehensive expression abilities.

The feature integration strategy emphasizes integrating content selectively based on institutional professional advantages, curriculum settings, and talent cultivation positioning to achieve teaching tailored to institutional characteristics and needs. Some institutions may adopt a progressive teaching arrangement, using *New College English* in the first half of the semester to consolidate language foundations, then transitioning to *Understanding Contemporary China* in the second half to enhance critical thinking and international communication capabilities. *Understanding Contemporary China* Volume 2, with its greater topic depth, knowledge density, and critical thinking intensity, is more suitable for later-stage teaching, while some themes from Volume 1 are appropriate for early-stage parallel use with *New College English* through theme integration strategies.

3　Conclusion

This section elaborates on the dual tasks of college English courses in language transmission and educational mission under the new era background, emphasizing the importance of advancing "Understanding Contemporary China" education for enhancing students' international communication capabilities; taking the integration practice of two textbooks as an example, it analyzes four integration paths—theme, skill, task, and feature—and their positive roles in curriculum ideological-political education, teaching depth, and student capability cultivation; it points out that integration strategies need to be applied flexibly according to local conditions, and mentions current challenges such as class hour arrangements and content coordination; finally, it looks forward to courses continuously exploring diverse integration models, maximizing the utility of teaching resources, and providing support for cultivating compound talents with both patriotic feelings and global vision.