1　Introduction

This section introduces the *Understanding Contemporary China* textbook series as a significant measure for implementing the "Three Integrations" initiative and curriculum-based ideological and political education. It points out that current research on textbook use focuses predominantly on macro-level analysis, while research on micro-level practical challenges and coping strategies remains relatively insufficient. Based on teaching practice and reflection, this study takes one unit as an example to explore how teachers can effectively use this textbook in the classroom, aiming to provide practical reference for frontline teachers and facilitate the dual goals of ideological and political education alongside foreign language teaching.

2　Research Design

This section describes the research design conducted in a Comprehensive English course for English majors at a university in Beijing. The study took Unit 4 "Whole-Process People's Democracy" from *Understanding Contemporary China: English Reading and Writing Tutorial* as a case, based on the iterative optimization of the author's award-winning lesson plan through multiple rounds, which was ultimately applied to a class of 15 second-year undergraduate English majors. The study addressed three research questions: challenges in textbook use, coping strategies, and teaching effectiveness. Data collection encompassed three types of qualitative materials: teaching materials and design (including 3 versions of lesson plans, 4 sets of courseware, supplementary videos and texts), teaching process records (5 class hours of audio recordings and transcriptions, 4 teacher reflections), and student output data (writing difficulty analysis, first drafts and revised drafts, post-class reflections), totaling 72,876 words. Analysis methods varied by question: for challenges, frequency statistics were used to extract student writing and comprehension difficulties; for strategies, Tyler's curriculum design theory was applied to extract dimensions from objectives, content, and assessment; for effectiveness, a combination of pre- and post-self-assessment, interaction data statistics, and top-down and bottom-up coding methods was employed to evaluate from dimensions including engagement, sense of gain, and product quality.

3　Challenges in Use

This section examines the "three insufficiencies" challenges teachers face when using the *English Reading and Writing Tutorial*. First, insufficient understanding of course objectives: students hold preconceptions that the textbook is overly theoretical with unclear connections to English proficiency development, resulting in passive classroom participation. Second, inability to tell China's stories: students possess shallow cognition of China-related topics, with 67% experiencing writing difficulties due to unfamiliarity with topics and 100% identifying language expression as the greatest barrier, capable only of listing political terms in Chinese without accurate English expression. Third, ungrounded narrative content: student output is filled with abstract and grandiose concepts such as "whole-process people's democracy" lacking concrete examples, making it difficult for international audiences to comprehend and weakening cross-cultural communication effectiveness.

4　Coping Strategies for Challenges

Based on Tyler's four elements of curriculum theory, this section constructs a teaching strategy system of "objective-guided learning and scenario introduction—comprehension scaffolding and output deepening—assessment for confidence building and assessment for writing improvement" to address the three core problems of students' insufficient understanding of course objectives, inability to tell China's stories, and ungrounded narrative content.

In the objective-guided learning and scenario introduction phase, teachers first clarify the course positioning to students: this course belongs to content and language integrated learning, aiming to enhance language skills through content learning, with the core objective of cultivating foreign language majors to become international communicators in the new era. Subsequently, multi-step scenario introduction helps students understand task requirements, including translating key sentences, watching related videos, and setting up simulated situations, enabling students to clarify the communication context, topic, communicative identity, and purpose, thereby stimulating learning interest and participation enthusiasm.

The comprehension scaffolding and output deepening strategy follows the "comprehension first" principle, breaking down the overall output objective into sub-objectives encompassing comprehension, output, and education dimensions. Teaching materials are textbook-based with three new categories of supplementary resources added: specific cases from the *China's Democracy* white paper, multimodal audio-visual resources, and student writing samples. In-class activities are designed around the comprehension dimension through four segments: discussion, self-assessment, structure analysis, and question answering; the output dimension consolidates comprehension through activities including idiom translation, comparative translation, and audio-visual speaking. Post-class extension includes reading the white paper, watching videos, and writing speeches, forming a coherent "in-class—post-class" learning chain.

The assessment for confidence building and assessment for writing improvement strategy focuses on the problems of students' speeches lacking register characteristics and concrete examples. In-class adopts a teacher-student collaborative assessment model, first affirming text highlights to build student confidence, then guiding students to identify problems through sample comparison. Comparative discussion of three student writing samples highlights the importance of concrete examples, with teachers guiding students to transform written expression into oral expression and incorporating examples such as "grassroots legislative liaison offices" to ground abstract concepts. Teachers and students jointly summarize two improvement methods—adding evidence and register transformation—based on which students revise texts and write reflections after class, achieving comprehensive improvement in the closed loop of "introduction—comprehension—output—assessment."

5　Teaching Effectiveness and Reflection

This section examines teaching effectiveness and teacher reflection after students used *Understanding Contemporary China: English Reading and Writing Tutorial*. Two rounds of self-assessment show synchronous improvement in students' understanding ability, expression ability, and narrative confidence regarding Chinese-style democracy: understanding improved from 60% of students at the 20% low level to 80% of students showing improvement, with 9 reaching 50%—75%; narrative confidence improved from over 60% at the 20% low level to over 80% reaching above 50%. Students were able to use concrete examples to explain abstract concepts, with 14 students using cases to support arguments in revised drafts, and language expression becoming more colloquial and concise. Meanwhile, student classroom participation exceeded expectations, with voluntary hand-raising increasing from the usual 4 person-times per class hour to 5—7 person-times, and full engagement in writing revision suggestions during the assessment class. Students' impressions of the textbook changed, recognizing that content is closely related to life, with明显增长 in interest in explaining China-related topics in English,主动关注 political news expressions in English after class, and gradually clarifying that the course objective is to understand contemporary China and accurately communicate China's stories in foreign languages.

6　Conclusion

This section discusses the characteristics of "Understanding Contemporary China" courses that equally emphasize language and content learning while possessing curriculum-based ideological and political education attributes, and their value in enhancing students' language proficiency and cultivating patriotism and global vision. Three teaching strategies are proposed: objective-guided learning to clarify dual objectives of language and content; comprehension first and output follow-up, enhancing cross-cultural narrative ability through deep understanding of China; and integration of teaching, learning, and assessment, using evaluation to improve students' confidence and expression ability in telling China's stories. Finally, it points out that future research may focus on diversified teaching case design and textbook value transformation.