Abstract

This paper aims to establish what teachers, leaders and researchers can actually do to make university foreign language teaching culturally responsive in collectivist settings more effectively. Systematic review following PRISMA 2020 was used. Every strategy was sorted by its source of evidence and rated for confidence. Six families of action emerged, covering classroom relationships, negotiated content, face-safe speaking tasks, group work, feedback and assessment, and teacher and institutional support. Scaffolded speaking, structured group work and inquiry-based teacher development were best supported; the rest rested largely on opinion, and controlled tests were scarce. The review proposes an integrative cycle of eliciting, scaffolding, structuring, aligning and reflecting as an analytic framework, not a validated model, and argues that strategies should be treated as hypotheses for action research and design-based testing, that scaffolds should be faded deliberately, that local content should be negotiated rather than assumed, and that teacher training should build inquiry skills rather than cultural profiles.