A Study on the Value Exploration and Practical Path of Traditional Culture Education in Chinese Language Classrooms from the Perspective of Moral Education and Character Building

Abstract

This study investigates how traditional Chinese culture education in higher education College Chinese (Daxue Yuwen) classrooms can be strategically reoriented to advance the fundamental task of fostering virtue through education (Lide Shuren) and character building. Grounded in national curriculum standards and UNESCO's cultural literacy framework, the research bridges theoretical insights from Confucian virtue ethics, care-based moral development, and contemporary pedagogical scholarship with empirical realities of classroom practice. Through a critical review of existing literature, the paper identifies a persistent disjunction between the normative emphasis on cultural inheritance and the fragmented, often superficial, implementation observed across schools. To address this theory--practice chasm, the study proposes an original conceptual architecture---the Three-Dimensional Integration Model (3DIM)---which organizes cultural pedagogy along three interdependent axes: the Textual Axis, emphasizing semantic depth and hermeneutic rigor in classical and modern texts; the Relational Axis, foregrounding dialogic meaning-making among teachers, students, and texts; and the Embodied Axis, incorporating ritualized practices such as chanted recitation and aesthetic reflection to cultivate moral sensibility and agency. The model is empirically anchored in findings from a national survey of 1,247 language teachers, revealing widespread gaps in interpretive training, assessment capacity, and curricular time allocation---particularly acute in local and vocational institutions. Implementation pathways are differentiated by scale---from micro-integration in grammar tasks to cross-curricular projects---and aligned with China's Five-Education Integration policy and Core Competencies for Chinese Students. The study concludes that effective traditional culture education must move beyond symbolic representation toward ethically engaged, contextually responsive praxis. It offers actionable recommendations for teacher professional development, formative assessment design, and curriculum policy reform, positioning language instruction not merely as linguistic transmission but as a vital site for cultivating morally grounded, culturally rooted citizens.