The Department of Foreign Languages was founded in 1926. Famous alumni include many distinguished scholars and university professors in China, such as Cao Yu, Qian Zhongshu, Ji Xianlin, Rong Gaotang, Zha Liangzheng, Wang Zuoliang, Xu Guozhang, Li Funing, Ying Ruocheng, Hu Zhuanglin, and so on, who have won great honor and reputation for the Department.

　　The Department was restored in 1983 after a long interval of discontinuity, and currently, it has a Ph.D. Program in English Language and Literature, three M.A. Programs in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, English Language and Literature, and Japanese Language and Literature, and two undergraduate majors, English and Japanese. The Department offers university-wide language courses in English, Japanese, German, Russian, and French. In the past twenty years, the Department has made a tremendous progress in the development of its disciplinary subjects, research, curriculum reform, faculty recruitment and training, collaboration with sister universities, and the upgrading of its teaching facilities. There are four research centers housed in the Department: Center for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Research Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Center for Translation and Interdisciplinary Studies, Center for the Study of Japanese Language and Culture. The Department has inherited the rich tradition in the humanities at Tsinghua, and is striving to strengthen the above four areas of study in addition to the English language and literature, and make contributions to the noble endeavor to make Tsinghua a world-class university.

　　Since 1983, with the generous support of the school administration, the Department has invested great efforts in faculty restructuring and recruiting, and particularly, starting from 1999, the Department, with the endorsement of SHSS, has successfully recruited a number of leading scholars in several fields and young faculty members with Ph.D. degree. At the same time, the Department has explored possibilities to allow its younger teachers to pursue a Ph.D. degree. The above efforts have brought great changes to the formation and quality level of the faculty and have created favorable conditions for further development in the field of foreign languages. At present, the Department has 22 full professors, including 6 doctoral advisors, whose scholarly achievements, age, and educational background have placed the Department at a better position than its sister universities in the nation.

　　 The Department has made significant achievements in the research. At present, the faculty is undertaking 11 projects funded by the National Funds of Social Sciences, 8 projects by the Ministry of Education, 1 by the Degree Office of the State Council and the Degree and Graduate Students Education Committee of China, and a few projects by the 985 Project of Tsinghua University. Three completed projects have won the second prizes for Achievements in Social Sciences in Beijing, and its pedagogical research and practice have won a number of national awards and awards from the Municipal Government of Beijing. The “Tsinghua University English Proficiency Test System,” developed to facilitate reform in college English teaching, has been approved by the Ministry of Education. The faculty has been putting out dozens of books, textbooks, and reference books, and hundreds of research papers, and particularly, in the past five years, there are over twenty English papers published by the faculty that are indexed in SSCI and A&HCI.

　　 The Department continually broadens its connections and academic exchanges with sister universities at home and abroad to push its research to the forefront of the world, often inviting famous scholars to give lectures, some of whom have been appointed as guest professors. Every year the Department sends some of its teachers abroad for training, lecturing, or attending international conferences. Recently, it has begun to co-host the internationally-renowned and A&HCI-indexed journal Perspectives: Studies in Translatology with the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. A number of professors in the Department serve as editors, advisors, or officers for a few internationally-renowned academic journals, associations or institutions. It has co-hosted a number of high-level conferences in literary criticism, linguistics, translation studies with Yale University, Harvard University, Oxford University, and so on.

　　Currently, Professor Luo Lisheng is chair of the Department, and Professors Liu Shisheng, Lv Zhongshe, and Zhang Wenxia are vice chairs.

　　Address:
　　Department of Foreign Languages
　　School of Humanities & Social Sciences
　　Tsinghua University
　　Beijing, P. R. China
　　Postal code: 100084
　　Tel: 86-10-6278 2115
　　Fax: 86-10-6278 5568
　　E-mail: wyx@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn