Integrating Cultural Heritage through Case-Based Pedagogy in Foreign Language Education in Uzbekistan: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Integrating learners’ cultural heritage into foreign language education raises an important pedagogical question: how can culturally meaningful knowledge be transformed into activities that require purposeful target-language use? Case-based pedagogy offers one potential approach by organizing learning around situations, problems, dilemmas, and interpretive tasks that require learners to mobilize language in context. This systematic review examines the intersection of case-based pedagogy, Uzbek cultural heritage, and foreign language education in Uzbekistan. Following PRISMA 2020, international bibliographic databases and relevant regional scholarly sources were searched for empirical studies addressing foreign language teaching or learning, pedagogical case use, and identifiable Uzbek cultural heritage or local cultural knowledge in the Uzbekistani context. Studies were examined in relation to cultural representation, case design, language-mediated learner activity, reported learning outcomes, and construct–measure alignment. The synthesis identified two related but largely parallel strands of research. One addresses case-based foreign language pedagogy in Uzbekistan without clearly establishing the integration of identifiable Uzbek heritage, whereas the other incorporates Uzbek cultural resources into foreign language education without clearly establishing pedagogical case use. The available evidence therefore does not establish a sufficiently developed empirical literature in which both components are systematically integrated and evaluated within the same instructional design. Rather than demonstrating established effectiveness, the review identifies an integration gap between case-based pedagogy and heritage-responsive foreign language education. To address this gap, the review proposes pedagogical alignment coherence among cultural representation, case architecture, language-mediated learner activity, intended learning outcomes, and assessment evidence as an analytical framework for future research. Future studies should explicitly transform Uzbek cultural heritage into case-based language-learning tasks and evaluate linguistic, cultural, intercultural, cognitive, affective, and identity-related outcomes using construct-appropriate measures.