Integrating intangible cultural heritage into academic English for social science postgraduates: an implementation framework and research design at Jiangsu University

To address potential disconnects between language instruction and disciplinary inquiry, and the difficulty of transforming local cultural resources into material for academic argument, this paper proposes a curriculum and research plan under a foreign-language project approved within the Jiangsu Provincial Program for Excellence in Applied Social Science Research. The proposed participants are non-English-major master's students in the social sciences who entered Jiangsu University in 2024 and 2025. The project will use Taiping Nijiaojiao, an intangible cultural heritage practice from Zhenjiang, as a shared case and students' hometown heritage as the focus of independent inquiry. Drawing on needs analysis in English for Specific Purposes, genre-based pedagogy, the production-oriented approach, project-based learning, and constructive alignment, the curriculum will guide students through question formulation, evidence collection, interpretation, expression in English, feedback and revision, and transfer to new contexts. The research will combine iterative teaching improvement with embedded mixed-methods evaluation, using individual writing, oral defenses, process portfolios, and interviews to examine implementation conditions and changes in learning. The paper specifies course content, instructional measures, data collection, assessment criteria, and implementation arrangements, offering a research proposal that can be tested and adapted when local heritage resources are incorporated into postgraduate academic English teaching. Meanwhile, combined with the four values of intangible cultural heritage, this paper connects the economics, sociology and political science modules of ESP textbooks for non-English-major social-science postgraduates, and explores the integration path between the intangible-cultural-heritage value system and academic English tasks for different social-science orientations.