As educators, we are in a constant dialogue with the future. The summer of 2025 provided a crucial opportunity to reflect on this dialogue and fundamentally reshape LANG2170, "Chinese Communication Skills for Humanities & Social Science Studies." This article aims to share the pedagogical principles that guided our revision, hoping to spark further conversation among colleagues about how we can collectively advance our teaching practices in an era of profound change.

LANG2170 serves a specific and vital role: it is a mandatory, discipline-specific language course for second-year Global China Studies (GCS) students. Our goal has always been to move beyond basic language proficiency and cultivate advanced academic communication skills. However, two major catalysts prompted a deeper revision: the introduction of the CLE’s new Communication Competency Framework (傳意能力框架) and the ubiquitous rise of Generative AI (GenAI). Our challenge was not merely to update a syllabus, but to re-envision the entire learning journey to be more authentic, resilient, and pedagogically sound.

Principle 1: From Framework to Aligned Practice

The new CLE Communication Competency Framework provided the foundational blueprint for our revision. Rather than treating it as a checklist, I viewed it as a compass for ensuring our course objectives were both ambitious and coherent. This process is a direct application of Constructive Alignment (Biggs, 1996), where the Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs), teaching activities, and assessment tasks are deliberately interwoven.

As detailed in our internal review, I mapped each of the course’s five ILOs directly to the framework’s core competencies, such as "Logical Expression (邏輯表達)" and "Appropriate Expression (得體表達)." For instance, ILO #2 ("Enhance the ability to critically analyze literature...") was linked to the framework's emphasis on "Critical Thinking (慎思明辨)" and "Source Evaluation (審辨信源)." This alignment ensures that when we teach students how to write a literature review (Assessment A3), we are not just teaching a format; we are explicitly cultivating the higher-order thinking skills defined by our center's shared educational philosophy.

Principle 2: Simulating an Academic Apprenticeship through Scaffolding

To make the learning experience more meaningful, we infused the course with a single, overarching narrative: the simulated journey of a young academic. This approach draws heavily on the theories of Situated Learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991), which posits that learning is most effective when it occurs within an authentic context and a "community of practice."

Our four core assessments were redesigned to be progressive stages in an "Academic Apprenticeship (學術學徒制)":

1. Assessment 1 (Oral Report): The student is a "Young Scholar" presenting their initial research idea at a mock symposium.
2. Assessment 2 (Peer Review): They become a "Discussant," critically but constructively evaluating their peers' work.
3. Assessment 3 (Literature Review): They then act as a "Paper Author," formalizing their research for a mock conference proceedings.
4. Assessment 4 (Article Analysis): Finally, they ascend to the role of a "Junior Reviewer," offering a professional critique of a published expert's work.

Each assessment guide now begins with a detailed " Scenario" (情境) description, immersing the student in their role. This scaffolded design (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976) does more than just build skills incrementally; it cultivates a holistic "Scholarly Persona (學術人格)". Students learn that academic communication is not a series of disconnected tasks, but an integrated set of practices and ethical stances within a professional community.

Principle 3: A Principled and Metacognitive Approach to GenAI

The "elephant in the room" for all educators today is GenAI. A simple ban is both impractical and educationally shortsighted. Instead, we developed a detailed GenAI policy designed to foster academic integrity and, more importantly, Metacognition—the practice of "thinking about one's thinking" (Flavell, 1979).

Our policy avoids a one-size-fits-all approach by defining two distinct usage pathways:

• Content Integration (內容納入): For any AI-generated content that is directly used, students must cite it like any other source and provide a full transcript of their interaction in an appendix.
• Process Assistance (過程輔助): For using AI for brainstorming, grammar checks, or outlining, students simply need to declare this on a submission form.

This dual-pathway forces students to pause and self-reflect: What is my purpose in using this tool right now? Is this my idea or the machine's? How am I, the human, adding value to this output? This reflective process is a powerful learning tool in itself. It shifts the focus from a fear of "cheating" to a conscious cultivation of a human-AI collaborative ethic, preparing students to be critical users, not passive recipients, of technology. This policy is part of a wider "GenAI Resilience Strategy," which emphasizes personalized, process-oriented tasks that AI cannot easily replicate, such as defending a research outline in a one-on-one consultation.

Looking Forward: Questions for Our Community

The revision of LANG2170 is not an end-point but a starting point. It has raised several questions that I believe are pertinent to all of us at the CLE:

1. Authenticity at Scale: How can the principles of situated learning and "academic apprenticeship" be adapted for larger, more diverse language courses without a specific disciplinary focus?
2. Assessing the Process: As GenAI makes the final "product" less reliable as an indicator of student ability, how can we develop robust methods for assessing the "process" of learning, inquiry, and reflection?
3. The Future of Competency: How should our Communication Competency Framework evolve to explicitly include human-AI collaboration as a core skill? What does "originality" mean in this new context?

By embedding our course design in established pedagogical theory and confronting the challenges of our time head-on, we hope to have created a more engaging and effective learning experience. I look forward to continuing this vital conversation with all of you.

References:

• Biggs, J. B. (1996). Enhancing teaching through constructive alignment. Higher Education, 32(3), 347–364.
• Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive–developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34(10), 906–911.
• Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press.
• Wood, D., Bruner, J. S., & Ross, G. (1976). The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 17(2), 89–100.