Integrating Mount Tai Culture into College English Writing Instruction: A Production-Oriented Pedagogical Design Supported by the iWrite Digital Writing Platform
China’s college English classroom remains an underused context for developing students’ ability to express local culture in English, a problem long identified as “Chinese Culture Aphasia.” While a growing body of research has explored integrating regional cultures, such as Yellow River and Ba-Shu cultures, into College English teaching, limited attention has been given to combining local-culture pedagogy with the technological affordances of automated writing evaluation (AWE). This paper proposes a pedagogical design for integrating Mount Tai (Taishan) culture into College English writing instruction through the Production-Oriented Approach (POA), supported by the iWrite digital writing platform. Drawing on research on local-culture pedagogy, AWE, and POA, the paper develops a Mount Tai culture writing resource bank, a three-phase “motivating–enabling–assessing” teaching cycle supported by iWrite, and a multi-source assessment structure. The design aims to give students sustained opportunities to communicate Mount Tai culture in English while offering a potentially transferable framework for technology-supported College English writing instruction. As a proposed design, its effectiveness and transferability remain to be examined through future empirical research.
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