With the advancement of educational digitalization, digital teaching resources have become increasingly integrated into primary English education, offering new possibilities for cultivating students’ cultural awareness. This study investigates how digital teaching resources contribute to the development of cultural awareness among primary EFL learners by examining the interrelationships among school-level digital resource construction, teachers’ application practices, and students’ cognitive perceptions. Adopting a mixed-methods design, questionnaire data were collected from 313 fifth and sixth-grade students in a public primary school in eastern China, complemented by semi-structured interviews with students. Descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, and structural equation modeling (SEM) were employed to analyze the data. The results indicate that digital teaching resources are significantly associated with all dimensions of cultural awareness, with a clear imbalance characterized by strong cultural knowledge but relatively weak intercultural communication competence. SEM results further reveal that teachers’ application functions as a proximal driver of cultural awareness development, while school construction serves as a distal structural condition exerting its influence primarily through teachers’ practices. In addition, student cognition initiates a progressive psychological pathway from cultural knowledge to intercultural communication competence. By modeling the multilevel mechanisms underlying technology-mediated cultural awareness development in primary EFL education, this study extends existing research on digital intercultural learning and highlights the critical mediating role of teachers in transforming digital resources into meaningful cultural learning experiences.
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