School of Foreign Languages Studies
- An Overview -
Welcome to the School of Foreign Languages Studies of Jimei University!
The School of Foreign Languages Studies(SFLS) was established in April 2004 by the merger of the Foreign Language Department of the former Teaching College of Jimei University (re-established in 1977 and admitted its first undergraduate students in 1998) and the four English Teaching and Research Departments of the former Jimei Navigation College, Xiamen Fisheries College, Fujian Physical Education University, and Jimei Finance and Economics College. At present, the SFLS has one office, six departments — English Department, Japanese Department, Department of Translation and Interpretation, College English Teaching Department, English Teaching Department for Music, Sports and Arts Majors(ETDMSAM), English Teaching Department for Marine Majors(ETDMM), one research institute —Sino-foreign Cultural Comparison Research Institute, two centers — the Language Service Center and the Language Lab Center.
The SFLS has three undergraduate programs: English Language, Japanese Language and Translation/Interpretation. The English Language major has two training directions: Teaching English and Business English. The Master of English Education program was approved in June 2015 and the first enrollment began in the spring of 2016. At the same time, the SFLS and the School of Chinese Language and Literature School jointly set up the Master of World Literature and Comparative Literature program. By May 2021, the SFLS has 1,036 full-time undergraduates and 64 postgraduate students. The Departments of College English and ETDMSAM are responsible for the public English teaching for more than 13,000 undergraduates of various majors, master candidates and doctor candidates in the university, while the ETDMM is responsible for the public English teaching for Marine majors.
The school has 145 faculty members, including 129 full-time teachers, 5 Lab technicians and 11 full-time CCP and administration officials. There are 6 professors, 39 associate professors and 81 lecturers. There are 24 teachers with PhD degree or studying for doctoral degree, 95 teachers with master degree. In addition, the college employs 1 chair professor and 2 visiting professors titled with Minjiang Scholars, as well as nearly 20 full-time foreign teachers every year. After several years of development, the school has formed five academic teams, namely literature study, culture study, linguistics study, translation/interpretation study and Japanese study, and has made certain achievements in linguistics, foreign literature and other research fields. In the past five years, teachers of the school have published more than 200 papers in academic journals at all levels, and nearly 30 monographs or translated works. It has won one key project of National Social Science Fund, one national online quality course, 7 online quality courses of Fujian Province, one first-class practical course of Fujian Province, one excellent teaching achievement award of Fujian Province, and one teaching team of Fujian Province.
The school has managed to raise funds for the construction of basic teaching facilities, and has preliminarily completed the construction of foreign language teaching facilities with complete functions, sufficient quantity and stable performance. The school has 5 language laboratories with a total of 350 seats; 8 oral English teaching classrooms with a total of 320 seats; 6 College English Autonomous Learning Center with a total of 800 seats; 31 multimedia classrooms; 1 simultaneous interpretation laboratory, 1 computer-aided translation/interpretation laboratory; and the 5 newly built sets of FM transmitting listening test system, which are distributed in 3 areas with a total of 202 classrooms, can accommodate nearly 20,000 students to take the test at the same time. The school establishes a foreign language teaching and learning network platform which enables students to take paperless college English test by the iTest system, and teachers or students practice English research and study by the sentence-cool correcting network, four-grid business training platform and other software or facilities. These modern teaching facilities accelerate the pace of foreign language teaching reform and improve the efficiency of running schools and the quality of teaching. The foreign language reading room, donated by Mr. Wang-Hanzhang, a patriotic Chinese Singaporean, has a collection of over 20,000 books, which provides favorable conditions for teachers and students to study and research more conveniently.
The SFLS takes discipline construction as the leading task, strengthens the construction of teaching staff, constantly improves the teaching quality, improves the conditions for running schools, and elevates the academic level. Focusing on undergraduate education, the SFLS actively develops postgraduate education and attaches importance to improving the academic ability and teaching practice ability of masters of education. In 2018, 8 students of the Master of Education graduated successfully, and two of them won the 7th National Excellent Master of Education Professional Dissertation and Fujian Province Excellent Master of Education Graduate Dissertation respectively. The graduates of the school have not only a solid foundation of foreign language skills, but also certain professional skills. They are well received by the society, and the employment rate has been more than 95% over the years.
