1 Introduction

The Understanding Contemporary China textbook series aims to guide students in deeply studying Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, cultivating their ability to read and translate political discourse, and enhancing their critical thinking, intercultural competence, and international communication skills. Research on the use of these textbooks is still in its early stages, lacking in-depth classroom-level studies. This paper focuses on the challenges of comprehension, transformation, and output in teaching with the Understanding Contemporary China: English Public Speaking Tutorial, employing a dialectical research approach to refine a teaching framework and develop enabling activities that address these challenges, thereby responding to the difficulties students face in integrating Chinese political discourse into public speaking courses.

2 Analysis of Textbook Usage Challenges

The challenges students encounter when using the Public Speaking Tutorial are analyzed, primarily involving three aspects: text comprehension, text transformation, and output skills. The challenge of text comprehension lies in students' need to deeply understand highly generalized and abstract Chinese political discourse, such as the "poverty alleviation institutional system." The challenge of text transformation involves adapting textbook content into speeches suitable for their own identities, navigating the differences between grand narrative perspectives and individual narratives, as well as the contrast between formal discourse features and personal language styles. The challenge of output skills requires students to master effective communication techniques to tell China's stories well, avoiding a lecturing tone, while current classroom teaching lacks sufficient focus on public speaking skills for political topics.

3 Dialectical Research

This section explores the dialectical research on the use of the Understanding Contemporary China: English Public Speaking Tutorial, aiming to address difficulties at the three levels of comprehension, transformation, and output in textbook usage. The research follows a process of "learning and borrowing—proposing theory—practicing theory—reflecting and interpreting." Through iterative research over two academic years, an optimized theoretical and practical framework was developed. During the learning and borrowing phase, the Production-Oriented Approach (POA) theoretical system was introduced, emphasizing the importance of "enabling" in the teaching process—where teachers assist students in progressively achieving output goals. The study constructs an enabling teaching framework for integrating political discourse into public speaking courses, including teaching pathways and strategies, to address comprehension, transformation, and output challenges.

In the theory-practice phase, Unit 4 of the Public Speaking Tutorial, "People-Centered Development," was selected for teaching practice, focusing on the topic of "poverty alleviation." The teaching team designed a main speaking task and subtasks, along with corresponding teaching materials. In the instructional design, students were assigned the role of volunteer guides at a Chinese poverty alleviation exhibition, tasked with responding to foreign friends' questions about the current state of "Cliff Village." Through a series of enabling activities, the teacher guided students from understanding China's poverty alleviation policies to producing speeches.

At the comprehension level, the teacher used concrete cases to facilitate understanding of key terms and inspire political identification. Students analyzed the causes of poverty in Cliff Village, studied poverty alleviation measures, and connected "attribution" with "measures," thereby deepening their understanding of the concept of "targeted poverty alleviation." At the transformation level, the teacher helped students establish connections between social issues and their individual perspectives, translating political terminology into personal narratives. Through personal sharing, students recounted their views on poverty alleviation, achieving a shift in narrative perspective and speech style. At the output level, the teacher cultivated students' ability to "tell China's stories well," fulfilling the communicative purpose of public speaking. Students enhanced the persuasiveness of their speeches by supporting arguments with cases and data.

Finally, the teacher reflected on the relationships between teaching activities, analyzing the logical coherence of the instructional design. Five activities were sequentially implemented to address challenges at the comprehension, transformation, and output levels, assisting students in completing the process from understanding to output. By analyzing students' speech outputs, the teacher reflected on teaching effectiveness and identified issues such as inappropriate wording and incoherent expression when students discussed "poverty alleviation" measures. The teacher then reflected on the teaching process to explore methods for improvement.

4 Conclusion

Focusing on the challenges of using the Public Speaking Tutorial, this study adopts a dialectical research approach to propose theory, practice theory, and reflect on interpretations. The research offers insights for textbook usage, emphasizing the importance of textbooks in ideological and political education. The author provides three recommendations for frontline teachers: 1) When teaching political speech courses, accurately understanding contemporary China is a prerequisite, requiring teachers to help students grasp the major policies of the Party and the state; 2) Given the abundance of political terminology in selected texts, avoid equal emphasis on all terms and instead combine in-class focus on key terms with self-study outside class; 3) Different types and topics of speeches require distinct speaking techniques, necessitating targeted analysis and meticulous instructional design by teachers.