The Specialty of English

    The Department of English, formerly the Department of English Education, was set up in 2012. It has now 20 teachers, including 3 professors, 7 associate professors, and 3 PhDs. The department’s aims of cultivation consist of two categories: 1) teacher education, and 2) interpretation and translation. Students on the teacher education programme will, upon graduation, skilfully use what they have learned with regard to their major for English teaching, educational management, and other types of work related to English, in primary and secondary schools, vocational and technical schools and/or other institutions. Students on the interpretation and translation programme will have solid foundation of both English and Chinese, of encyclopaedic knowledge and of other relevant specialized knowledge, so as to be competent in English-Chinese and Chinese-English interpretation and translation, in international business and trade, in technologies, in tourism arrangements, or in other activities concerning foreign affairs.

The Specialty of Business English

    The Department of Business English was set up in 2013, based on the former Department of English for Specific Purposes. The first enrolment of Business English undergraduates was in 2002, and from 2002 to 2012, the school had altogether produced 1600 Business English students. At present, the department has 22 teachers, including 1 professor, and 10 associate professors. Some of the teachers have won the first and/or second prizes in classroom instruction contests for young teachers of various levels: the university level, the provincial level, and even the national level. With “English + Business” as its fundamental pattern for its cultivation of students, the department lays stress on the main features of being “applied”, “inter-disciplinary”, and “wide-range”. Graduates of the specialty of business English will be able to work in the fields of commercial affairs, economics and trade, management, finances, or foreign affairs. They have a relatively broad scope of employment and have better job opportunities.

The Specialty of German

     The Department of German was established in 2007, and the first enrolment of German undergraduates was in the autumn of that year. At present, it has 9 teachers, and they are all returned overseas, working either on degrees or for professional improvement. They form a team with an international field of vision. The Department of German make efforts to cultivate students into applied inter-disciplinary talents who have solid foundations in German, and reasonable expertise in business and trade, by taking the pattern of “a foreign language + other specialties”, so as to make contributions to the local economic construction.

The Specialty of Japanese

    The Department of Japanese was established in 2009, with 10 teachers at present, including 2 associate professors, 3 PhDs, and 2 teachers from Japan. In addition to laying a solid foundation of the Japanese language and culture, the specialty also lays stress on the cultivation of the students’ language competence and performance, together with their ability to communicate in cross-cultural situations. Besides, the department emphasizes international exchanges and cooperation, and has established relationships with some Japanese institutions, such as Kyushu Foreign Language Academy of Japan, to which the department send students for practice or further study on a regular basis. Graduates of this programme have both good professional foundations and job opportunities.

Facilities

    The University Library has a collection of over 89,000 copies of foreign-language books, and the School’s References Room, founded in September 2007, houses 12,000 copies of books and 40-odd journals. The SFL now has established 11 language laboratories and 15 interactive classrooms, with a total value of 4.3 million yuan (RMB). The language labs cover an area of 1,198 m2, with 620 seats. The interactive classrooms cover an area of 1,200 m2, with 1200 seats.

    During the school’s Twelfth “Five-Year Plan” period (2015-2020), the School is to build 4 new language laboratories for language teaching, translation and business negotiation practice, with a total of 206 seats, and 32 new multimedia classrooms (including 9 new interactive multimedia classrooms) with an investment of about 8 million yuan (RMB).