Cultivating Cultural Subjectivity: The Value and Mission of Curriculum-based Ideological and Political Education in University English Major Courses
Curriculum-based ideological and political education is central to the moral-education mission of English majors in Chinese higher education. Its task is to embed cultural subjectivity within disciplinary knowledge rather than to append values to content from without. Taking Introduction to English Linguistics as a case, this paper develops a three-dimensional framework—curriculum as the foundation, classroom as the focus, and value orientation as the end. At the curriculum level, innovation in content and delivery, driven by corpus tools and real-world issues, supports the reconstruction of a Chinese genealogy of linguistic knowledge. At the classroom level, a teaching philosophy combining integration, process and critical thinking, operationalised through a “theory–comparison–reflection” model, enables organic internalisation of values. At the value level, cultural confidence, core values and life values address students’ professional identity anxiety in the age of machine translation. The paper argues that the three dimensions interact to shift ideological education from incorporation to internalisation, thereby contributing to the cultivation of foreign language professionals who are linguistically competent and culturally aware.
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