School of Foreign Languages
BIT School of Foreign Languages (SFL) dates back to the Russian Teaching and Research Group, which was established in 1952 and developed into Foreign Languages Teaching and Research Section in 1960 and Department of Foreign Languages in 1984. In 2006, SFL came into being. SFL consists of three departments, namely, English Department, Japanese Department and German Department, three teaching and research sections, namely, College English Teaching and Research Section, Graduate English Teaching and Research Section and Doctoral English Teaching and Research Section, and a Foreign Language Training Center. German training assessment scores given by Foreign Language Training Center are recognized by German government and universities. SFL is responsible for foreign language teaching for all the non-English-major undergraduates, graduate candidates and doctoral candidates in BIT and offers courses for undergraduates and postgraduates majoring in English, German and Japanese. Besides, SFL also conducts research concerning foreign languages.
SFL has attached great significance to curriculum and discipline construction since it was founded. It aims to foster high-quality talents specializing in foreign languages with a command of both humanities and sciences, combining moral integrity and professional competence and knowledge about western as well as Chinese cultures. And in achieving this goal, it continuously make full use of resources of sciences, engineering and business administration of BIT, observe the norms of foreign language teaching, and its efforts will be devoted to fulfilling the social demands for foreign language professionals, and will remain student-oriented, encourage students’ individuality, and seek a balance between specialized education and quality education.
At present, SFL has a well-structured and high-quality faculty of 107 members, including 8 professors and 35 associate professors. 26 faculty members have been awarded doctorate degrees or are pursuing doctorate degrees.
At present, SFL has three undergraduate majors (Japanese, English and German) and four M.A. programs, namely, Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, English Language and Literature, German Language and Literature and Japanese Language and Literature, focusing on linguistics, literature and translation studies. Degree of Master of Translation and Interpreting (MTI) can also be conferred in SFL. SFL has now a total of about 500 undergraduates and master candidates.
SFL boasts its good teaching and research conditions and facilities including a university-level key laboratory—the Self-access Foreign Language Learning Center. The school library has a collection of more than 50,000 volumes. About 15 foreign experts from such countries as US, UK, Germany, Japan, etc. are working for SFL. With cooperative relations with overseas colleges and universities like the Technical University of Berlin, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Fukui University of Technology, the School regularly sends its teaching faculty and students abroad for academic exchange.
SFL has made great achievements in teaching and research. 8 monographs and 73 textbooks have been published, among which 4 are listed among China’s 11th Five Year Plan teaching materials. New Century Graduate English was recommended for graduate teaching by the Ministry of Education in 2005. College German and New Century Graduate English—Listen, Speak and Watch won the honor of Elite Textbooks in Beijing in 2005 and 2006 respectively. Copyright certificate was issued by National Copyright Administration for the Graduate English Online Self-study and Administration System Software developed by SFL.
The school is among the forerunners in College English teaching reform and has been appointed as one of the College English teaching demonstration base by Ministry of Education. College English—Listening and Speaking was chosen as one of Beijing Elite Courses and National Elite Courses in 2007.
In 2005, SFL was awarded a first prize for National Teaching Achievement by the Ministry of Education and a second prize for teaching achievement by Beijing municipality. And in 2010, SFL obtained a research project funded by the National Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science. Recently, SFL has got a humanities and social science project funded by the Ministry of Education.
