Abstract: Under the background of literacy-oriented education in China, unit teaching has become the focus of teaching design. Through literature collection and review, this paper analyzes the six major dimensions of unit design, including the definition of unit design, its theoretical foundation, the relationship between unit design and disciplines, the determination of unit objectives, the design of learning activities and the design of learning assessment. The research shows that unit design is mainly based on the integration within disciplines, and lacks systematic theoretical framework and solid implementation tools. In order to promote unit design, it is necessary to broaden the horizon of unit design, not only by considering integration within the units, but also integration between units; not only by considering integration within disciplines, but also integration beyond disciplines; secondly, it is necessary to research and develop tools for unit design, i. e., to design integrative unit objectives and broad concepts, problem-based unit objectives, contextualized and life-oriented unit core learning activities, and to develop integrated unit evaluation tasks. Finally, it is necessary to strengthen the theoretical development of unit design, i. e., to broaden the knowledge base of unit design, to collate the patterns of unit design, and to standardize the terminologies of unit design.