A Study on College English Writing in Moral Cultivation Based on the Multilingual Corpus of “Xi Jinping: The Governance of China” ()
1. Introduction
English writing is one of the essential English language skills. It is also a mandatory component of the CET-4 and CET-6 examinations. The 2020 edition of the College English Teaching Guide specifies clear requirements for English written expression abilities across the basic, intermediate, and advanced teaching objectives (College English Teaching Guide, 2020). College English teaching should be integrated into the university’s ideological and political education system within the curriculum, enabling it to play a significant role in fulfilling the fundamental task of fostering virtue through education in higher education institutions (College English Teaching Guide, 2020). “Curriculum ideology and politics” refers to “integrating ideological and political education into all aspects and stages of course teaching and reform, thereby achieving the subtle and silent cultivation of virtue through education” (Shi & Wang, 2020). General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out that “all universities, all teachers, and all courses must shoulder the responsibility of nurturing students, guarding their designated sections and tending their responsibility fields, so that various courses align and progress in the same direction as ideological and political education courses, integrating explicit and implicit education to create a synergistic effect and build a comprehensive pattern of all-staff, whole-process, and all-around education”(Xi, 2016). The “Guidelines for the Construction of Curriculum-Based Ideological and Political Education in Higher Education Institutions,” issued and implemented by the Ministry of Education on May 28, 2020, clearly stipulates that ideological and political education should permeate the talent cultivation system and that curriculum-based ideological and political education in higher education institutions should be comprehensively advanced. How to leverage the comprehensive multilingual database platform of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China to promote the integration of ideological and political education into college English writing courses has become an ongoing topic of exploration for college English teachers. This paper will be a conceptual paper proposing a teaching framework for College English writing in moral cultivation based on the multilingual corpus of “Xi Jinping: The Governance of China”.
2. Literature Review
Corpus, also known as a plural corpus in English, comes from Latin, meaning “body” and “trunk”. Mcnery, Xiao &Tono summarized the characteristics of a corpus as follows: 1) They are machine-readable electronic texts; 2) They are the actual language (spoken or written); 3) Language samples are strictly sampled (rather than randomly collected); 4) The purpose is to represent a language or language variant (Liang, 2016).
Scholars have conducted research on corpus-based college English writing and moral cultivation in college English courses from various perspectives. Studies included the moral cultivation in college English vocabulary courses (Lou, 2025; Xu & Lu 2023), pedagogical practices based on the Chinese-English parallel corpus of the report from the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (Du & Bao, 2025), and English translation teaching research utilizing the multilingual database platform of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China (Liu & Han, 2025; Yu & Cai, 2025). Scholars (Qin et al., 2025; Gao, 2025) have explored the integration of the English version of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China into ideological education in college English courses. Liang (2022) adopted the process-genre approach (including model analysis, collaborative writing, independent writing, peer-teacher evaluation, and work presentation) to investigate the practical application of digital humanities tools in college English writing instruction. Tao (2022) investigated the construction of a college English writing teaching model within the context of corpus-based approaches. Huang (2022) studied reading instruction based on Xi Jinping: The Governance of China, which has also been examined. However, few scholars have leveraged the multilingual database platform of The Governance of China to conduct research on moral cultivation in college English writing courses. This paper aims to conduct a model on moral cultivation in college English writing courses based on the multilingual database platform of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China in the writing platform iWrite. The multilingual database platform of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China and the writing platform iWrite are two separated tools in this model to benefit students in completing the College English writing tasks.
3. Multilingual Corpus Comprehensive Platform of
“Xi Jinping: The Governance of China”
The multilingual database comprehensive platform of “Xi Jinping: The Governance of China” was developed by Professor Hu Kaibao’s team from the Corpus Research Institute of Shanghai Foreign Studies University (Li & Hu, 2021). The corpus, knowledge database, and document database were included in the multilingual database comprehensive platform of “Xi Jinping: The Governance of China”. The corpus is composed of two choices: the teaching module and the scientific research module. Among them, the teaching module includes discourse presentation, and translation strategies and skills; the research module includes basic information, word frequency, KWIC/concordance, word families and collocations. The knowledge database consists of a terminology base and an allusion base. The document database has links to the literature. Four volumes of “Xi Jinping: The Governance of China” were collected in the multilingual database comprehensive platform of “Xi Jinping: The Governance of China”. The first volume “Xi Jinping: The Governance of China” was published in September 2014, the second volume was published in November 2017, and the third volume was published in July 2020. Volume IV (Xi Jinping: The Governance of China) was published in June 2023, including 109 speeches, talks, addresses, remarks, instructions, and congratulatory letters from February 3, 2020, to May 10, 2022, organized into 21 thematic sections. Volume V (Xi Jinping: The Governance of China) published by Foreign Languages Press in July 2025 compiled 91 reports, speeches, talks, addresses, remarks, articles, and instructions from May 27, 2022, to December 20, 2024, divided into 18 thematic sections. If the fifth volume of “Xi Jinping: The Governance of China” published in July 2025 can be collected in the multilingual database comprehensive platform of “Xi Jinping: The Governance of China”, the richness of the corpus of the multilingual database comprehensive platform of “Xi Jinping: The Governance of China” will be enhanced and more abundant corpus resources for learning and research will be provided by the multilingual database comprehensive platform of “Xi Jinping: The Governance of China”. There were many papers or speeches related to the moral cultivation in the multilingual corpus platform of “Xi Jinping: The Governance of China”, which was related to the moral cultivation in College English writing. And there were the strategies and skills for translation in the multilingual corpus platform of “Xi Jinping: The Governance of China”, therefore English teachers may use the multilingual corpus platform of “Xi Jinping: The Governance of China” to teach students in translational instruction and students may use the strategies and skills for translation in their writing tasks.
4. Teaching Process of Moral Cultivation in College English Writing Based on Multilingual Database Platform of
Xi Jinping: The Governance of China
Based on multilingual database platform of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China, the teaching process for integrating moral cultivation into the college English writing course primarily consists of six parts: English model text reading, English model text analysis, collaborative English writing, independent English writing, evaluation and feedback of English writing, and revision and finalization.
4.1. English Model Text Reading
In 1985, Swain proposed the “Output Hypothesis” theory, emphasizing the importance of output in language learning (Shan & Liu, 2020). Writing is an output task in language learning. As one of the fundamental language skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing, and translation), writing tasks in real life were often inseparable from reading tasks (Harmer, 1998, cited from Liang, 2022). To complete an English writing (language output) task, students required a sufficient amount of meaningful reading (language input) as support. Krashen’s Input Hypothesis theory posited that second language acquisition was not achieved through learning but depended on the acquisition of input, that was, understanding the meaning or information of the input content (Shan & Liu, 2020: p. 119). To better accomplish writing tasks, students can read English model texts related to the writing assignment from the multilingual database platform of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China online. Reading model texts not only allowed students to complete reading tasks but also provided them with various writing materials. By reading English translations of works by leaders, students not only learned knowledge about English vocabulary, sentences, paragraphs, and discourse but also subtly developed a correct outlook on life and the world, fostering a deep sense of national identity and accumulating material for college English writing. For example, the theme of Unit 4 in Book 1 of New Start College English was “Internet”. Students had the task of writing an English article on the topic of the internet. After reading the textbook passage, they can read the English article titled “Let a Healthy Internet Guide and Reflect Public Opinion” from Volume 2 of the multilingual database platform of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China. Since the internet falls under the category of technology, students can also read the English article titled “Build China into a World Leader in Science and Technology” from Volume 2 of the multilingual database platform of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China. Through reading English model texts related to writing tasks in the multilingual database platform of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China, students not only gained information pertinent to the writing task and learn knowledge about English vocabulary, sentence structures, etc., but also collected materials relevant to their writing. Simultaneously, ideological and political elements were gradually integrated into students’ learning and absorbed into their minds during the reading of these model texts.
4.2. English Model Text Analysis
Krashen’s Input Hypothesis theory posited that second language acquisition did not occur through learning but depended on acquiring the input, understanding the meaning or information of the input content (Shan & Liu, 2020: p. 119). To transform students’ reading of English model texts into comprehensible and meaningful input, in-depth analysis of the English model text becomes the first step in writing (Liang, 2022). Under traditional writing teaching models, teachers and students primarily analyzed paper-based model texts at the lexical, sentential, paragraph, and discourse levels (Liang, 2022: p. 53). In contrast, the multilingual database platform of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China can present both the macro-level discourse and micro-level features of texts in a visual format, making it easier for students to intuitively and systematically understand the discourse characteristics of the English model text.
Students can use the discourse presentation module in the multilingual database platform of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China to gain a macro-level understanding of the discourse features of the English model text.
At the micro level, students can use the word frequency option in the research module of the multilingual database platform of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China to generate a visual word cloud of the model text. The word cloud, formed based on the frequency of word usage with varying sizes, allows students to intuitively and clearly grasp the keywords of the English model text, thereby understanding the main points and core content of the discourse (Liang, 2022: p. 53). For example, in the English article titled “Build China into a World Leader in Science and Technology,” apart from words like “and,” “the,” “of,” “to,” “in,” and “a,” the word “innovation” appears 59 times, accounting for 1.39% of the text; “scientific” appears 52 times, accounting for 1.23%; and “development” appears 45 times, accounting for 1.06%.
According to Krashen’s Input Hypothesis theory, English model text analysis was good for students to acquire the meaningful input of language.
4.3. Collaborative Writing
Collaborative writing referred to a writing style that uses cooperative learning to engage in group activities in writing classes and jointly complete writing tasks (Liu & Wang, 2017). Writing, as a behavioral process, generally included three stages: perception, conception, and expression (Xu, 2012, cited by Liu & Wang, 2017). Students can freely pair up or form groups to engage in group activities of perception, conceptualization, and expression discussion, and then work together to complete writing. After reading the English model essays and their analyses from the multilingual database platform of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China, students could work together to write from three stages: perception, conception, and expression (Xu, 2012, cited by Liu & Wang, 2017). The first stage (perception) was the intuitive understanding of the objective world. The second stage (conceptualization) was of utmost importance in collaborative writing. After selecting the writing object and writing goal, people chose, organized, analyzed, and synthesized various scattered materials perceived, in order to establish the theme, basic content, and writing style of the article (Liu &Wang, 2017: p. 114). Gradually shifting from intuitive understanding of the objective world to rational understanding. Finally, students would express their well-conceived content in English and complete the entire process of collaborative English writing.
According to the “Output Hypothesis” theory, collaborative writing was beneficial to students’ output of language.
4.4. Independent Writing
After reading the English model essays, analyzing them, and engaging in collaborative writing, students began to independently complete writing tasks on the platform: iWrite. The platform (iWrite) was an English writing teaching and evaluation system developed by the Foreign Language Education and Research Press of Beijing Foreign Studies University. Students can practice English writing on iWrite , and the system had functions such as machine review, peer evaluation, and teacher evaluation for students’ English compositions. Independent writing followed a process similar to collaborative writing: the first stage (perception), the second stage (planning), and the final stage (expression). While drafting, selecting, and refining their wording, students can make full use of various corpus resources. This is because foreign language learning should emphasize authentic contexts of language use (Liang, 2022). The multilingual database platform of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China provided authentic contexts for language use and idiomatic expressions. To understand how vocabulary was used, students can refer to the concordance lines or KWIC (Key Word in Context) in the platform’s corpus. If they wished to examine discourse, they can view discourse displays; for allusions, they can consult the allusion database within the knowledge base. Supported by the abundant authentic contexts and idiomatic expressions offered by the multilingual database platform of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China, students were able to independently write relatively authentic English articles.
According to the “Output Hypothesis” theory, independent writing was beneficial to students’ output of language.
4.5. Evaluation and Feedback
After students independently completed their writing tasks on the iWrite platform and submitted their English articles, it was a crucial part of the writing processes to valuate students’ English articles and give the feedback for students’ English articles. The platform system (iWrite) evaluated students’ articles based on aspects such as grammatical accuracy and word count, providing specific revision suggestions. While the automated essay evaluation system(iWrite) offered detailed feedback, its assessments tend to be uniform and lack personalization. Moreover, the platform primarily focused on grammar, spelling, word count, and similar aspects, with relatively limited feedback on other areas such as content and structure. Therefore, teacher-led manual evaluation and feedback remained indispensable. On the iWrite platform, teachers can provide evaluations and specific feedback on students’ articles related to content, structure, logical coherence, word choice, and more. In addition to teachers’ evaluation, peer review among students can also be conducted. The iWrite platform included a peer review function, allowing students to evaluate each other’s essays once the teacher set the relevant parameters. Through the combination of automated feedback from iWrite, teachers’ feedback, and peer reviews, a diversified approach to evaluating and providing feedback on students’ writing was achieved.
According to the “Output Hypothesis” theory, evaluation and feedback were beneficial to students’ output of language.
4.6. Revision and Finalization
Students revised and finalized their English articles based on the specific feedback and suggestions provided by the teacher. The multilingual database platform of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China offered authentic contexts for language use and idiomatic expressions. Therefore, during the revision and finalization process, students can use the multilingual database platform of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China to verify the accuracy of vocabulary usage and explore authentic expressions, thereby making their revised and finalized articles more idiomatic. Students can resubmit their finalized articles via the iWrite platform, thereby completing the English writing tasks.
5. Limitations
There are some limitations for the teaching framework for College English writing in moral cultivation based on the multilingual corpus of “Xi Jinping: The Governance of China”. Teachers and students need to be trained on the multilingual corpus of “Xi Jinping: The Governance of China”. After the training of using the multilingual corpus of “Xi Jinping: The Governance of China”, teachers and students may utilize the multilingual corpus of “Xi Jinping: The Governance of China” for College English writing in moral cultivation based on the multilingual corpus of “Xi Jinping: The Governance of China”.
6. Conclusion
The teaching of moral cultivation in the College English writing course is an important part of the ideological and political teaching of College English course. The multilingual database platform of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China is an important and valuable resource for teaching the moral cultivation in the College English writing course. Teachers can carry out teaching the moral cultivation in the College English writing course from six aspects: model text reading, model text analysis, collaborative writing, independent writing, evaluation and feedback, and revision and finalization, so as to realize the organic unity of value building, knowledge teaching and ability training. In fact, there are much information related to culture, ecology, economy, technology and so on in multilingual database platform of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China, therefore, in the future, we could conduct researches related to this corpus-based approach adapted for the broader range of academic writing tasks required in college English courses.
Funding
This paper is supported by the philosophy and social science research program of Hubei Provincial Department of Education (Program title: Study and Practice on the Morality Cultivation Construction of School-based Characteristic College English Reading Courses based on the Multilingual Parallel Database of “Xi Jinping: The Governance of China” (Program No. 22Y038)).