School of Foreign Studies at Jiangsu Normal University has grown from Foreign Languages Department established in 1960, one of the earliest departments of JSNU. In 1960, it began to enroll undergraduate students majoring in English and Russian. In 2000, Department of Foreign Languages was renamed School of Foreign Studies. We started developing the International Marketing course in 1994. Japanese Department was established in 1999. Then we resumed enlisting Russian majors in 2002. Spanish Department was established in 2012. Translation Department was founded in 2015. The number of our faculty and staff totals 153, including 8 professors, 36 associate professors. More than 30 teachers have got or are applying for doctoral degrees.
School of Foreign Studies now consists of English Department, Department of Business English, Translation Department, Japanese Department, Russian Department, Spanish Department, Department of ESL I, II, III, IV, Foreign Language & Culture Research Institute, Indian Literature & Culture Research Center, Research Center for Ibero-American International Cooperation and other institutes. Department of ESL I, II, III are responsible for teaching English for non-English majors university-wide at the undergraduate level while the Department of ESL IV for those at the graduate level.
With the aim of strengthening the construction of disciplines and specialties, we kept insisting on the connotative development and the construction of teaching staff and refining our integral researching level. At present, we offer undergraduate and graduate programs in Foreign Language & Literature and also offer professional graduate programs, including the graduate program in English Language and Literature (2000), the graduate program in Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics (2006), the Ed. M program (2009), the MTI program (2010) and the graduate program in Japanese Language and Literature.
We take deep pride in our reputation and achievements in offering high quality education, career, and research opportunities for our students. School of Foreign Studies was evaluated as “Excellence” by Minister of Education in Undergraduate Teaching Assessment for English Majors in 2006. English Major was chosen as Provincial Distinctive Major in 2009. Our master degree programs ranked No. 4 in the assessment of the first-level discipline in Jiangsu Province in 2012. The pass rate of our students in TEM 8 has been 40% higher than the average one of Normal universities in China. The English Major of JSNU ranked No. 22 and was evaluated as A+ in a nationwide assessment conducted by Wu Shulian among 586 universities in 2014. We aim to cultivate talents with high quality, practical skills and comprehensive ability, forming a characteristic teaching mode and providing large amount of talents with humanity and devotion spirit, who are playing important roles in various professional domains.
SFL is a teaching and research center. Besides its efforts in education, SFL is always strengthening its academic advantage. In recent years, the faculty have undertaken over 20 national, ministerial and provincial projects.
Each year, our teachers are designated to be the deans on the Chinese side and instructors in Confucius Institute at Miami Dade College and The Queensland University of Technology to spread Chinese culture. Besides daily teaching, our Confucius Institutes successfully launched a series of activities to promote Chinese culture, achieving widespread repercussions in the U.S.A and Australia and making a solid foundation for JSNU in terms of cultural exchange, which was highly appraised by the NOCFL(China National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language).
The school has a modern teaching building of 8,000 square meters, equipped with 7 advanced language laboratories, 7 multimedia classrooms, 6 computer networks classrooms, satellite ground receiving equipment and radio stations for foreign language teaching. It also possesses large number of foreign language books and audio-visual materials, providing teachers and students a good condition for learning and working.