History

The School of Foreign Languages of CWNU (hereinafter called “The School” or “SFL”) is one of the first teaching units in Southwest China to train English majors. It has a 40-year-long history, with associate degree program and bachelor degree program launched in 1973 and in 1977 respectively. In 1996, the School of Foreign Languages became the University's first college through the merger of two separate units: Foreign Language Department and College English Department. The current SFL is solely responsible for training and managing foreign language majors, after March 2016 when the faculty members and staffs primarily serving non-English majors were transferred to the newly established College of English Education.

Specialties/Programs

The School now offers bachelor degree programs for students aspiring to explore in four specialties: English education, Business English, Translation, and Japanese. English education is a key specialty that receives privileged support from the University, and from 2015 onwards, this specialty has been made exclusive for those applicants who are rated as Tier-A students by their performance in college entrance examination. The School started to offer academic degree program for the research field - Curriculum and Teaching Methodology (English) in 1999 and professional degree program for the research field – Teaching Methodology (English) in 2009. In 2014, the University was officially approved to offer master degree programs for the research field – Literature and Translation, and SFL formally launched the aforesaid program in 2016.

Faculty

The School enjoys a qualified faculty, with the structures of teachers’ ages, origins of Alma Mater, and professional titles kept at comparatively reasonable levels. Among 90 faculty members and staffs in the School, 77 are faculty members, including 6 professors, 22 associate professors and 20 international teachers. More than 90% of the native faculty members hold master’s degrees and 10 teachers Doctorates, with 2 teachers studying for doctoral degrees. The School has maintained a stable academic exchange mechanism with secondary and tertiary educational establishments at home and abroad. Thanks to this mechanism, almost one third of our faculty members visited or are visiting, for academic pursuit or lecturing purpose, some educational establishments in countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. However, academic exchange is never a one-way street. The School also engages as part-time professors 15 scholars in some famous domestic universities, including Beijing University, Zhejiang University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Fudan University, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beijing Normal University, Sichuan University, Macao University, etc. and eleven middle school teachers with senior professional titles are engaged to serve as part-time supervisors for master candidates specializing in English language teaching methodology.

Facilities

The School is equipped with a broad spectrum of facilities for teaching and research purposes, including nineteen multi-media language labs (with nearly 1,200 seats in total), two micro-teaching rooms, one translation training room, one business English training room, one Japanese culture experience & training room, one language lab (exclusively for Japanese majors), and two reading rooms (with more than fifty thousand publications in languages like Chinese, English, Russian, Japanese and French) for teachers and students respectively.

Teaching & Research Results

The School channels the faculty members into seven dedicated teaching teams for the fields below: English Language & English Language Teaching, Business English Teaching, English Reading & Writing, English Literature & Culture, Translation (between English and Chinese), English Listening & Speaking, and Japanese Language & Culture. Driven by the efforts of these teams, a handful of quality courses have been nurtured, including one provincial-level quality course, one quality course (that is included in Sichuan provincial pool of publicly accessible quality courses) and three university-level quality courses. Moreover, our teachers have developed two university-level innovative research teams (one for Anglo-American Literary Criticism and the other for Ecocriticism) and three shared research interests: English Education, English Literature & Culture, and Translation. In respect of academic discipline development, the School has witnessed fruitful results in recent years. The faculty members are undertaking a total of thirteen research projects, with four projects under National Social Science Fund and ten ones under provincial or ministry-level funds. More than twenty books have been published and over two hundred papers been carried by prestigious journals like Foreign Literature Review, Foreign Literature Studies, Modern Foreign Languages, and Foreign Language World. On top of that, the School has obtained over ten prizes by MOE or Sichuan Province for its achievements in teaching and research.

The School has long served basic education and participated in the nationwide campaign to reform basic education curriculum, producing some positive influence on the circle of basic education. It plays a significant or even core role in key activities related to basic education in Sichuan Province, including assisting in English curriculum reform in senior middle schools, organizing demo teaching activities for English teachers in junior and senior middle schools, and designing and grading English test paper of college entrance examination autonomously assigned by the Province.

Extracurricular Activities

With unstinting commitment to twin goals of preparing first-class teachers for basic education undertakings and training foreign language learners with multiple capabilities, SFL makes every possible endeavor to help students develop themselves in an all-round way. To this end, it focuses strongly on training students to develop basic skills of foreign languages while motivating them to increase their ability to think critically and innovate. For the purposes of enhancing educational quality and promoting the competitiveness of students in job market, the School has launched a wide variety of well designed extracurricular activities, ranging from the Sino-Foreign Cultural Exchange Festival (an annual event highly consistent with the features or objectives of the existing specialties), social outreach activities, outward development activities, mock job interview competition, to campus-wide talent shows. For students, these activities represent good opportunities for broadening their horizons, increasing their capabilities, promoting their team awareness and moral awareness, as well as improving their academic performance and after-class life.

The School encourages students to throw themselves in various high-profile nationwide competitions designed for foreign language majors. So far they have achieved impressive results in such events as 21stCentury National English Speaking Competition, National English Competition for College Students (NECCS), FLTRP Cup National English Debating Competition, CCTV Cup National English Speaking Contest, the National Teaching Skills Competition for Teaching Majors of Normal Universities, Huawen Cup Teaching Skills Competition for Teaching Majors of China, National Spoken English Competition, NAEW Cup English Writing Competition, and China Youth Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition.

Employment

In recent years the School has embraced a strong momentum of development and fared well on student enrollment and employment, with the rate of student employment kept above 90%. Our alumni as a whole are well recognized in the society. It may then be safely assumed that SFLCWNU has established itself as an important base for preparing English teachers for basic educational establishments in Sichuan Provinces and Chongqing City and for training qualified foreign language learners with versatile talents to address other needs of these two regions.