The history of the School of Foreign Studies (SFS) of Xi’an Jiaotong University (XJTU) traces to 1897, just a year after the university was founded in Shanghai as Nan Yang College. At that time, the contemporary SFS was known as the Department of Western Languages. Nan Yang College became Chiao Tung University in 1928, marking the year the Department of Foreign Literature was established.
Currently, SFS offers 3 undergraduate programs: English (including double majors in English & German, English & French, and English & Russian), Japanese (including a double major in Japanese & English), and French. SFS is authorized to offer master's degrees in Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, English Language and Literature, Japanese Language and Literature, French Language and Literature. SFS also runs a Master of Translation and Interpreting (MTI) program (English, Japanese). In 2013, SFS initiated a Ph.D. program in Systemics of Language and Culture. About 90 students are enrolled annually in SFS Master's or Doctoral programs.
SFS departments and institutions include the English Department, Japanese Department, French Department, Russian and German Department, College English Teaching Center, Postgraduate English Teaching Center, MTI Education Center, Foreign Languages Research Center, Center of Japanese Studies, the Center of Cross-Cultural Studies, and other support centers such as the Teaching Experiment Center, Center for Translation and Interpreting, and the Center for International Language Tests.
The faculty and staff total 199, including 179 teachers (107 for college English and postgraduate English teaching, 23 professors, and 83 associate professors) and 20 staff. Each year, about 30 experts and teachers from other countries work at SFS, and some 20 visiting professors and part-time professors visit or teach. SFS has about 760 students, including 460 undergraduates, 190 postgraduates, and 110 doctoral students.
SFS boasts brilliant and talented faculty members actively engaged in research who have achieved outstanding results in foreign linguistics and applied linguistics, foreign literature and culture, translation studies, international and regional studies, and so on. In the recent five years, SFS’s faculty have presided over 15 national-level projects with 12.9 million yuan supported by various research funds, published 146 papers in SSCI/CSSCI-indexed journals and 84 books, and won an Outstanding Scientific Research Award second prize granted by the Ministry of Education of China, and 8 prizes of Philosophy and Social Science Research by Shaanxi Province. Provincial/ministerial-level departments have accepted38 recommendations proposed by SFS’s faculty
SFS has been authorized to offer an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Systemics of Language and Culture since 2012, building an undergraduate-Master-Doctorate well-rounded education system. SFS also established ties to 17 well-known universities in the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Australia, and other countries and has implemented extensive exchange and cooperation programs to promote international studies and research. Each year, more than 20 international scholars are invited to give lectures.
SFS has been located in the Shaw Building since 2010 and added new offices in the Western China Science & Technology Innovation Harbour (iHarbour) in 2019. Today’s SFS has well-equipped laboratories, classrooms with advanced recording, broadcasting, multimedia, and simultaneous interpretation training systems, a taping studio, rich online resources for language studies,and a library with30,000 foreign language books and dozens of academic journals.Given these resources,SFS is an ideal place for foreign languagestudy,teaching, and research.
