1　Introduction

This section elaborates on the strategic positioning of foreign language education in building an international communication system, points out the phenomenon of "Chinese cultural aphasia" when students tell China's stories to foreign audiences, and explains how the *Understanding Contemporary China* textbook series integrates value shaping, knowledge transmission, and competency cultivation to help students understand China's discourse system and narrative framework from an intercultural perspective.

2　Theoretical Foundation

This section reviews the development of discourse competence theory, from Hymes' communicative language ability to Canale's strategic competence and discourse competence, and then to contemporary integrated models emphasizing multi-dimensional dynamism. It focuses on the TSSI Discourse Competence Model proposed by Li Yuan and Lian Fei (2024), which comprises four dimensions: textual competence, sociocultural competence, strategic competence, and intercultural awareness, highlighting the role of audience in discourse meaning construction and setting explicit requirements for multilingual thinking, multiple perspectives, and autonomous learning in intercultural contexts.

3　MOOC Development Background

This section introduces the publication background and usage difficulties of *Understanding Contemporary China: German Public Speaking Course*. Research shows that teachers, lacking experience and supporting resources, spend excessive time on pre-class preparation and tend to convert public speaking classes into intensive reading sessions; students, due to insufficient background knowledge, weak willingness to speak publicly, and lack of vocabulary and skills, struggle to achieve discourse transformation. Both teachers and students urgently need resource support at the "understanding" and "production" levels, which prompted the development of the *German Public Speaking* MOOC.

4　MOOC Design Concept and Course Structure

This section elaborates on the TSSI discourse competence-oriented design concept of the *German Public Speaking* MOOC, constructing content from four dimensions: "why to speak," "to whom to speak," "what to speak about," and "how to speak," aiming to enhance students' textual competence, sociocultural competence, strategic competence, and intercultural awareness. Based on *Understanding Contemporary China: German Public Speaking Course*, the MOOC covers seven units including the Chinese Dream, reform and opening-up, and poverty alleviation, with a total duration of 560 minutes, containing 120 knowledge points, 350 test questions, and 70 ideological and political elements. Each unit consists of six lectures: the first two lectures explain the connotation and background of core concepts in China's social development to cultivate sociocultural competence; the third lecture integrates intercultural public speaking strategies; the fourth and fifth lectures use German translations of Xi Jinping's speeches as models to analyze textual and strategic competence, incorporating corpus methods; the sixth lecture features student speech examples and roundtable reviews to achieve comprehensive application of discourse competence. The course is taught in German with Chinese-German bilingual subtitles, with intercultural topics set in each unit to promote students' understanding of core concepts through case analysis.

5　MOOC Development Path

This section constructs a MOOC development path with "understanding—interpretation—production" as the main thread. At the understanding level, the MOOC helps students deeply understand conceptual connotations by creating authentic situations and establishing connections between thematic content and personal life, such as in the "poverty alleviation" unit where students are guided to interview elders and compare Chinese and foreign poverty reduction models to stimulate their willingness to tell China's stories. At the interpretation level, following the content and language integrated learning philosophy, discourse competence is fostered through intercultural reflection, such as in the "Belt and Road" unit where the concepts of "tianxia" (all-under-heaven) and the Western "world" are compared to demonstrate that Chinese solutions are rooted in traditional wisdom, cultivating learners' ability to think from others' perspectives and accurately convey China-specific concepts. At the production level, targeting the characteristics of German-speaking audiences, a "four-speaking method" narrative framework is proposed, using shared emotions as the medium for intercultural communication to support individual narratives, with input demonstrations running through the first three lectures of each unit, and in the sixth lecture's speech examples, students are guided to select strategies independently, with roundtable reviews deepening discussions, thereby telling China's stories well and understandably.

6　MOOC Development Effectiveness

This section discusses MOOC development effectiveness from three dimensions: teacher needs, student competence, and concept transfer. At the teacher level, the MOOC alleviates the problem of insufficient resources for lesson preparation and teaching, its "four-speaking method" provides a handle for interpreting themes, supports innovative blended online and offline teaching, and expands application to courses such as interpretation and writing as well as diplomatic talent cultivation scenarios. At the student level, the MOOC builds cognitive scaffolding through everyday materials to promote understanding and critical thinking; intercultural reflection stimulates innovative associations to enhance interpretation ability; intercultural situations and example references promote production practice, with students showing increased enthusiasm and comprehensive quality in participating in international activities and competitions. At the concept transfer level, the MOOC integrates the TSSI discourse competence model into its design, verifying the feasibility of the "understanding—interpretation—production" path; its development experience starting from emotional commonality can be transferred to MOOC development for *Understanding Contemporary China* textbook series in various languages, and its multi-subject teaching and emotional support design also have reference value for similar MOOCs.

7　Conclusion

This section elaborates on the mission of foreign language disciplines to integrate Chinese cultural communication competence into teaching, introduces the effectiveness of the *German Public Speaking* MOOC in cultivating textual competence, sociocultural competence, strategic competence, and intercultural awareness following the "understanding—interpretation—production" path, while reflecting on shortcomings such as fragmented resources disrupting coherence, lack of adaptive technical support, and outdated content, and looks forward to future directions including optimizing instructional design, developing multi-dimensional knowledge graphs, building smart courses and AI digital textbooks, and conducting empirical research, aiming to cultivate international communication talents with both Chinese soul and global vision.