Research on Integrating Internationalization with Moral Education in Artificial Intelligence-Empowered Postgraduate Public Foreign Language Education ()
1. Introduction
In the current context, the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology offers a new round of opportunities for profound transformations in higher education. Driven by AI technology, the intelligent corpus, personalized learning systems, automatic writing feedback, and intelligent evaluation tools can provide new technical support for foreign language teaching and practice. They also offer the possibility of building a new educational model that integrates knowledge transmission, competence development, and value shaping. In this study, integration refers to the purposeful and coordinated alignment of language knowledge instruction, competence development, and value-oriented educational goals within the same teaching process, rather than treating them as separate or parallel tasks. At the same time, higher education in the new era, with the fundamental mission of fostering virtue through education, emphasizes the dual enhancement of both moral education and the quality of talent cultivation.
For postgraduate students, public foreign language courses aim not only to develop the ability to engage in international academic communication but also to provide value-oriented education, which in this study refers to the cultivation of students’ moral awareness, cultural confidence, social responsibility, and ability to express Chinese perspectives and values appropriately in intercultural and academic contexts. At the same time, these courses are expected to foster internationalization capability, defined here as students’ ability to use a foreign language effectively in international academic, professional, and intercultural settings, including language proficiency, cross-cultural communication ability, global awareness, and the capacity to articulate China’s cultural stance. However, in current foreign language teaching, the development of internationalization capability and value-oriented education is often disconnected. Either international perspectives and language skills are overemphasized while value guidance and the expression of cultural stance are neglected, or ideological and political practice is overvalued while the effective integration with the internationalization capability development is ignored. Therefore, in the context of technology empowerment, how to achieve the coordinated integration of competence development and value shaping, and how to practically cultivate students’ foreign language internationalization capabilities while providing value-oriented ideological and political education, has become a key focus at present.
This study is grounded in the demand for high-quality development of higher education in the new era, focusing on the teaching reform of AI-empowered postgraduate public foreign language education. It aims to explore how to effectively integrate the foreign language internationalization capability and the course-based ideological and political objective, and attempts to construct a suitable integration path for public foreign language courses for postgraduates, proposing a set of practical and scalable teaching reform plans. These plans can serve the strategy of foreign language education internationalization and respond to the goals of both value-oriented ideological and political education and the expression of cultural stance.
Thus, this study aims to systematically explore the application of AI technology in postgraduate public foreign language education, investigating how it can effectively empower the integration of the internationalization of foreign language education and course-based ideological and political objectives. The specific goals of this study include:
1) To investigate the current application status and trends of AI technology in postgraduate public foreign language education.
2) To build an AI-empowered teaching design framework for postgraduate public foreign language education that integrates an international perspective and value-oriented education.
3) To design and verify a set of practical teaching implementation paths that achieve the coordinated development of foreign language proficiency and ideological and political education.
4) To provide a replicable model for the reform of postgraduate foreign language education, thus supporting Double First-Class universities in cultivating high-level foreign language talents.
2. Literature Review
2.1. AI Technology
AI is a field of computer science concerned with automating tasks that typically require human intelligence, enabling computers and machines to imitate human intelligence and problem-solving capabilities (Shrivastava, 2024). The core advantages of AI technology lie in its capacity for personalized support, process monitoring, and data feedback (Zhang, 2014). Its emergence is transforming various industries and has been widely applied in modern life, gradually penetrating into multiple fields such as education, finance, healthcare, and manufacturing (Weng et al., 2024). In education, typical AI technologies, such as intelligent writing assistance systems, corpus analysis tools, and learning behavior tracking platforms, can optimize learning paths, enhance feedback efficiency, and support formative assessment mechanisms, providing technical support for precise teaching (Li & Xiao, 2025).
2.2. Public Foreign Language Courses
As an international language, the image of English as an international and modern language, along with the current trends in international language choice, indicates the language’s emphasis on practicality in global application (Li, 2015). Against this backdrop, foreign language courses in universities play a crucial role, not only in language teaching but also in further shaping the image of internationalization and modernization. Therefore, as part of university foreign language courses, postgraduate public foreign language courses are not only about language skills training but also about cultivating students’ cross-cultural communication skills, international academic expression abilities, and understanding of global issues (Li, 2024). Specifically, these courses aim to develop students’ humanistic qualities, international perspectives, professional abilities, innovative spirit, and their passion for the family and country, enabling them to be familiar with national policies and conditions while possessing an international perspective, proficiency in foreign languages, and a solid command of international rules. In this way, students can become modern talents capable of adapting to the current international demands characterized by the typical development features of AI. Moreover, the teaching methods of public foreign language courses emphasize innovation and practicality, aiming to stimulate students’ interest and enthusiasm in learning and improve teaching effectiveness (Public English Teaching Reform of Nankai University, 2016). This further requires that the course design of postgraduate public foreign language go beyond mere language practice and build a more open, interactive, and critical-thinking learning environment.
2.3. Moral Education
Moral education refers to a comprehensive educational concept that incorporates ideological and political education into course teaching (The Meaning, Goals, Content, Principles, Requirements and Methods of Course-Based Ideological and Political Education, 2022). It has become an important direction for the current teaching reform of higher education in China, aiming to fulfill the fundamental task of fostering virtue through education across various courses (Zheng, 2025). Its core is to provide moral and values education, integrating value guidance into knowledge transmission and ability cultivation, and helping students shape sound worldviews, philosophy of life, and values (The Meaning, Goals, Content, Principles, Requirements and Methods of Course-Based Ideological and Political Education, 2022). Currently, AI-empowered reform of ideological and political education has become a major trend, with digital empowerment bringing new opportunities for such reform. From the perspectives of resource, structural, and psychological empowerment, a new approach in ideological and political education analyzes the collaborative education online and offline, the free switch between practice and virtual environments, and the balance of individuality and commonality (Huang, 2024). The new approach enables the precise alignment of teaching resources with the goals of ideological and political education (Li & Xiao, 2025).
As an important bridge connecting China with the world and a significant tool for cross-cultural communication, public foreign language courses should not only cultivate an international perspective but also strengthen cultural identity and value guidance, achieving the unity of competence development and value shaping (Li, 2024; Wang, 2025). In addition, this study argues that AI technology should not merely serve as an efficiency tool but also play a supportive role under value guidance, achieving synergy between instrumental and value rationality. In light of this, integrating AI, postgraduate public foreign language education, and ideological and political education to cultivate high-level talents with an international perspective, language proficiency, and value identity has become the focus of this study.
3. Research Design
The participants in this study were postgraduate students and teachers of public foreign language courses in Inner Mongolia, China. A total of 600 students and 10 teachers were involved. The instruments of this study included closed-ended questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. The questionnaire included items measuring both competence development and value-oriented education outcomes. Specifically, the value-oriented education dimension was assessed through students’ self-reported responses on cultural confidence, social responsibility, and their perceived ability to articulate Chinese positions in discussions of global issues and intercultural communication. The research methods mainly consisted of literature review, questionnaire surveys, semi-structured interviews, and classroom observation.
4. Construction of the Integration Model
Based on the above literature review, this study attempts to construct a three-dimensional integration model for postgraduate public foreign language education, focusing on three major dimensions: AI empowerment, internationalization capability development, and value guidance in moral education. As shown in Figure 1, this structural model consists of three dimensions: technology empowerment, competence development, and value-oriented education. The technology empowerment dimension, as the foundation of this model, refers to the embedding modes and functions of AI technology in teaching, focusing on enhancing teaching efficiency, supporting personalized learning, and strengthening process monitoring. This dimension includes intelligent corpus analysis, AI writing feedback systems, learning behavior data collection, and intelligent evaluation mechanisms. The competence development dimension serves as an intermediate layer of this model, centering on the competence development goals of postgraduate public foreign language courses, specifically emphasizing the cultivation of postgraduates’ academic English expression abilities, cross-cultural understanding, and the capacity to analyze and articulate perspectives on global issues. The value-oriented education dimension, as the core regulatory factor of this model, reflects the implementation path of moral education in postgraduate public foreign language education. By integrating China’s development practices, cultural confidence, and social responsibility issues into teaching, this dimension guides students to demonstrate value positions and cultural identities in international communication, ultimately enhancing their social responsibility awareness and the ability to articulate a Chinese cultural standpoint.
In this model, the three dimensions are not parallel; instead, they form a nested structure that operates cyclically. Technology empowerment provides tool support for competence development, competence development offers practical carriers for value expression, and value-oriented education sets the direction and boundaries for technology utilization and competence development. Firstly, by embedding AI tools into the classroom, the learning process can be digitally supported and feedback can be made more visible, thereby enhancing students’ learning efficiency and engagement. Next, technology platforms allow project-based learning and task-driven activities related to global issues, strengthening students’ cross-cultural expression and academic communication abilities. Finally, integrating Chinese perspectives and cultural elements into discussions of global issues and language practices helps students develop a stronger sense of value identity and social responsibility. This model breaks through the single skill-oriented perspective of traditional foreign language teaching by incorporating the application of AI technology into the goals of postgraduate public foreign language education and moral education, thereby achieving the structural integration of technological tools, competence development, and value-oriented education. This model provides a systematic framework for the reform of postgraduate public foreign language courses and offers a new perspective for research on moral education in the context of AI.
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Figure 1. A three-dimensional integration model of AI-empowered postgraduate public foreign language education.
5. Practical Verification and Analysis
To verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the three-dimensional integration model, this study carried out a teaching pilot practice. During this process, it adopted questionnaire surveys, classroom observations, interview records, and learning behavior data analysis to systematically evaluate the implementation effect of this model.
5.1. Design and Implementation of Teaching Practice
This study involved 600 postgraduate students and 10 teachers from public foreign language courses in Inner Mongolia, China. The student participants were drawn from five universities in the region, and the teacher participants were selected based on their direct involvement in course teaching and implementation. Data were collected through closed-ended questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, classroom observation, and learning behavior records. Among the 600 students, 537 provided valid questionnaire responses. In addition, one pilot class at a university in Inner Mongolia was selected as the platform for a semester-long AI-empowered teaching practice in the autumn of 2025. The practice lasted for 16 weeks, during which students’ learning behaviors were dynamically recorded. During this period, AI writing feedback and intelligent corpus analysis platforms were integrated into the courses to support academic writing training and discourse analysis, while a learning management system was used to collect data on learning duration, assignment submission frequency, and participation in interactions. The courses also included task-based learning units on global issues, such as Global Governance and China’s Development and AI Ethics and Social Responsibility, in order to guide students to retrieve information, express viewpoints, and conduct cross-cultural comparative analysis. In addition, the teaching design incorporated topics related to China’s development practices and cultural confidence, encouraging students to articulate Chinese perspectives in international contexts. No formal comparison group was used. Therefore, the study should be regarded as an exploratory pilot-based investigation rather than a controlled experimental study.
5.2. Analysis of Questionnaire Results
This study distributed questionnaires at the beginning and end of the teaching pilot practice to assess the effect of integrated teaching. In the questionnaire, value-oriented education outcomes were measured through students’ self-reported responses to items concerning cultural confidence, social responsibility, and their ability to express Chinese positions appropriately when discussing global issues. The results show that AI technology played a supportive role in competence development and also promoted the effective development of internationalization capabilities and value guidance. Analysis of 537 valid questionnaires revealed that the majority of students indicated that, with the support of the AI writing feedback system, their academic expression norms and logical structures improved. This suggests a significant enhancement in students’ self-assessed international academic expression ability. Additionally, over 72% of the students believed that the course content of the teaching pilot enhanced their international perspective and cross-cultural communication awareness, reflecting an increased depth in their analysis of global issues in cross-cultural understanding. Most students also stated that in discussions of global issues, their awareness of expressing Chinese positions strengthened, and their cultural confidence and social responsibility awareness were also stronger than before. These results indicate that integrated teaching achieved relatively positive effects in both competence development and value-oriented education.
5.3. Learning Behavior Analysis
By accessing the data from the learning platform, this study also found that, compared with previous courses, students’ participation in online learning significantly increased, and the average learning duration also rose compared to the traditional teaching stage. These data showed that students revised their assignments more frequently than in previous traditional courses, and the structural completeness of academic texts also improved. This reflected that the AI feedback mechanism had, to some extent, enhanced students’ awareness of revision. The data also showed that students became more active in online interactions and classroom discussions. This suggests that the introduction of AI technology had, to some extent, increased students’ learning engagement and improved the quality of classroom interaction.
5.4. Interview Results and Classroom Observation Analysis
After the questionnaire survey and learning behavior analysis, this study conducted interviews with both students and teachers. The interview results further corroborated the findings from the questionnaires and observations. Most of the interviewed students indicated that the immediate feedback provided by AI tools enhanced their writing confidence and enabled them to discuss global issues more confidently. At the same time, some students also pointed out that the integration of moral education helped them articulate a Chinese perspective more clearly in international communication. Interviews with teachers indicated that the three-dimensional integration model helped improve classroom organization efficiency and the structural integrity of teaching, though there were certain challenges regarding technical adaptation and content integration in the early stage of implementation. Classroom observation showed that the integrated teaching model indeed promoted students’ participation and the depth of their critical thinking, fostering a more open and interactive classroom atmosphere.
The above analysis shows that in the teaching pilot practice, the three-dimensional integration model enabled students to achieve a dynamic interplay among their technical skills, competencies, and values. This model also helps facilitate the integration and coordinated development of the internationalization of postgraduate public foreign language education with moral education.
6. Integration Path and Institutional Support
This chapter further optimizes the three-dimensional integration model, thereby rendering it a clearer and more practical integration path. This path can be summarized as three progressive stages from tool support to competence development and then to value internalization, as shown in Figure 2.
The first stage is technology embedding. This stage focuses on selecting appropriate AI tools and embedding them into actual teaching scenarios to address the issue of how students can use technology properly, enabling them to ultimately enhance their expression efficiency and quality by utilizing technology. For instance, AI writing feedback systems can be used in students’ daily academic expression training, intelligent corpora can assist students in text analysis and structure learning, and learning behavior data platforms can visualize students’ learning processes. The second stage is competence integration. In this stage, technology is no longer an independent tool but becomes a support system for students’ competence development. Therefore, the teaching focus shifts to competence development and teaching structure optimization. The courses in this stage are designed around global issues to create project-based learning tasks, guiding students to apply their language skills in real contexts for critical expression and cross-cultural comparison. The third stage is value internalization. This stage emphasizes educating students through expression and achieving the coordinated development of students’ international perspectives and value-oriented education. Building on the competence development in the second stage, the courses in this stage incorporate Chinese development issues and cultural expression content, guiding students to articulate Chinese value positions and cultural identity in international communication, and ultimately enhancing students’ awareness of cultural and social responsibility from a broader perspective.
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Figure 2. A progressive integration path of technology-competence-value.
The continuous operation of the integration path also relies on relevant institutional support mechanisms. Based on teaching practice, this study further establishes an institutional support mechanism to sustain the integration path. This mechanism forms a system from four aspects: organizational support, institutional framework, evaluation feedback, and resource support, thus transforming the integration path from classroom practice into an institutional norm. At the organizational level, it emphasizes the establishment of a collaborative promotion mechanism to ensure that the integration path does not solely rely on individual teachers but reaches a team consensus. The key is to leverage the postgraduate public foreign language teaching and research team by establishing a course reform working group within the team and clearly assigning responsibility for technology application to individuals. At the same time, the teaching goals are decomposed, integrating AI and moral education into regular teaching and research agendas, thus normalizing collective lesson preparation, case sharing, and experience reflection. At the institutional level, the focus is on improving teaching norms and operational standards for postgraduate public foreign language courses. Usage norms for AI tools, data security requirements, and value guidance principles are clearly included in the teaching management documents, ensuring that competence development and value shaping have an institutional foundation centered on global issues and value guidance. At the evaluation level, the aim is to establish a data-driven feedback mechanism. Data on learning behaviors, student participation, competence development, and value expression are integrated into a comprehensive evaluation system to support necessary teaching adjustments based on the findings. Finally, it is essential to strengthen technical and training support for teachers. Establishing a clear AI application training mechanism, along with providing technical operation guidance and teaching case demonstrations, can enhance teachers’ adaptability and effectiveness in using AI tools. These four dimensions of support can ensure the continuous operation of the integration path within the institutional framework.
7. Conclusion
This study centers on the integration of internationalization with moral education in AI-empowered postgraduate public foreign language education. This study also constructs a three-dimensional integration model of technology empowerment, competence development, and value-oriented education. Through teaching pilots and data analysis, it verifies that technology support promotes postgraduates’ foreign language internationalization capabilities, and clarifies that the cultivation of these capabilities facilitates the internalization of ideological and political value expression. The three-dimensional integration model provides a well-structured and well-defined implementation framework for the reform of postgraduate public foreign language courses. Based on classroom practice and data verification, this study also establishes a progressive integration path and an institutional support mechanism. The study shows that the application of AI technology in postgraduate public foreign language teaching should not remain at the superficial level of skill use, but should serve the cultivation of internationalization capabilities and value shaping under the guidance of ideological and political education goals. The findings of this study can not only optimize the teaching model of postgraduate public foreign language education, but also provide practical examples and theoretical references for university course reform in the context of AI.
Nevertheless, this study has several limitations. First, the research was conducted within a single regional context, namely Inner Mongolia, China, which may limit the broader applicability of the findings to other institutional or geographical settings. Second, the practical verification of the model was based on a pilot-course setting rather than a controlled experimental design, and no formal comparison group was included. Third, part of the evidence relied on students’ self-reported perceptions of improvement in areas such as internationalization capability, cultural confidence, and value-oriented development. Therefore, the findings should be interpreted primarily as exploratory evidence of the feasibility and pedagogical value of the proposed model, and future studies could further strengthen the conclusions by including more diverse regions, multiple course settings, comparison groups, and more objective outcome measures.
Overall, this study provides an exploratory framework for understanding how AI empowerment can support the coordinated development of competence cultivation and value-oriented education in postgraduate public foreign language teaching.
Funding
The current study is sponsored by the Reform Project of Postgraduate Education and Teaching in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (Grant No. JG2025002C).