The Foreign Languages Building is scheduled to complete in June, upon which all six TKU foreign languages departments will move in to this new “home”, enabling all the faculty and staff of these departments to work under one roof for the first time. To mark such an unprecedented occasion, the university has made this year “The Year of the Foreign Languages”. The Dean of the College of Foreign Languages and Literatures (CFLL), Sung Mei-Hua is of particularly optimistic that such a building will spur further development in the foreign language education at TKU.
Language education defined the university in earlier days as it started out as a Junior College of English, Tamkang, which makes the English Department its first faculty of all time. In 1970, the department also set up one of the first graduate schools at TKU, the Graduate School of Western Languages and Literature Studies, and the other one being the Graduate School of Mathematics. Since then, TKU has diversified to establish itself as a well-rounded comprehensive university, and so has its foreign languages program. Today, there are six language departments under the CFLL, namely, English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Russian.
Dean Sung sees this year, with the new space provided by the building, a wonderful opportunity to allow the faculty and students of the college to accomplish some more ambitious goals. In celebrating such a wonderful prospect, she has arranged a series of activities to be held in the following months to showcase numerous brilliant performances and exhibitions. Each month is named with a particular theme, for example, the month of May, a month that has been officially declared as the “Month of Foreign Languages” will be filled with theaters, dances, authentic foreign cuisines and exhibitions of students’ works. Next month, a month of “Moving House and New Start”, there will not be any particular activities, but the college will use this time to settle in their new home, contemplating on the their bright future.
September will be a month of “Multi-language E-learning” as at the beginning of the semester, the website for multi-language learning will be officially launched. This project has involved faculties from six departments in cooperation with the Departments of Educational Technology and Computer Science and Information Engineering, so that students are able to learn dialogs, cultural tips, vocabulary, sentence structure and grammar in all six languages in an interactive multi-media mode! This project is a brainchild of a marriage among computer technology, language teaching pedagogy, and multiple-intelligence theory to highlight the nature of learning a foreign language is actually fun and painless.
As for October, it will be a month of “Foreign Languages Competition”, hosting a series of speech and debates contests. In November, which coincides with TKU’s founding anniversary, the theme will be the “Month of Sister Universities”, hosting at least two international conferences inviting scholars from TKU partner universities around the globe. When December finally arrives, everyone can sit back and relax to enjoy such a successfully year by sharing Christmas festivities and customs from various countries; hence December is also a “Month of Christmas Culture”.
Celebration aside, Dean Sung has planned to expand the college by adding four graduate institutes to Russian, Spanish, Japanese, and German Departments respectively. There will also be the establishment of more translation and interpretation courses for practical-minded students as well as the implementation of enforcing the second foreign language policy for all language majors. Finally, every senior student must pass a foreign language proficiency test as well as the National English Proficient Test for all majors except those of Japanese.
All in all, the completion of the new building will bring all departments together to have closer cooperation in teaching and research. This cooperation will surely push TKU one step further into a better internationalization. (~ Ying-hsueh Hu )
