The history of the School of Foreign Languages (School of International Education) can be traced back to the Russian Language Teaching and Research Office established in 1964. In 1978, the Teaching and Research Section of Foreign Languages was founded. In 2001, the Department of Foreign Languages was established and then renamed the School of Foreign Languages in 2005. In 2020, Chinese International Education was integrated into the School, bringing the new name—School of Foreign Languages (School of International Education). The School currently consists of five academic units: the Department of English, the Department of Japanese, the Department of Translation, the Department of Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages, and the Department of College Foreign Language Teaching. It also houses a number of administrative and research bodies, including the General Office, Teaching Affairs Office, Research Office, Student Affairs Office, Center for Rhetoric, Discourse and Communication Studies, Center for Translation Studies, Center for Linguistics and Interdisciplinary Studies, Center for Regional and Country Studies, Center for Comparative Literature and Cross-Cultural Studies, Center for Testing and Question Bank Development, Center for Japanese Language Teaching and Research, Center for Cultural Communication Studies, MTI Education Center, and Language Integrated Experimental Teaching Center. The School is authorized to confer the Master of Translation and Interpreting (MTI) and hosts a provincial key discipline in Cultural Communication Studies. In 2022, its English major was approved as a National First-class Undergraduate Program.

The School has 110 faculty and staff members, including 5 professors, 32 associate professors, and 27 faculty members with doctoral degrees. The faculty team features a well-balanced age structure and a strong profile in terms of academic qualifications and professional ranks. Over the past five years, the School has made steady progress in the reform of college foreign language teaching and the optimization of professional talent cultivation models. It has been approved for 4 provincial teaching reform projects and 7 industry-university collaborative education projects sponsored by the Ministry of Education and has received 1 Grand Prize in the University Teaching Achievement Awards. It has also developed 3 provincially recognized first-class courses and 1 provincial model course integrating value education into the curriculum and published 5 textbooks. The Japanese editions of China’s BeiDou and A Heroic Ode to Yimeng have been published and distributed in Japan.

In the past five years, the School has undertaken 69 research projects, with total research funding of RMB 8.19 million. It has published 76 academic papers, obtained 2 patents, and produced 4 policy consultation reports that were formally acknowledged by provincial and higher-level government authorities. The School has hosted more than 100 academic lectures on cutting-edge topics, supported over 120 faculty members in attending domestic and international academic conferences, and selected 6 faculty members for academic visits to universities in Germany, Japan, the United States, and other countries. The School was honored as an Advanced Collective in Employment Work of the University in 2025. All six students in the Class of 2026 who were recommended for postgraduate admission without entrance examination have all secured admission to leading universities in China.

Guided by the educational philosophy of “integrating Chinese and foreign cultures and cultivating both virtue and competence,” the School takes fostering virtue through education as its fundamental mission. In the process of talent cultivation, it has focused on exploring innovative interdisciplinary and broad-based training models for language majors and actively reforming talent cultivation programs. It highlights interdisciplinary talent cultivation models such as “foreign languages + international communication,” “foreign languages + regional and country studies,” and “foreign languages + international Chinese language education.” The School has established stable internship, practical training, and employment bases through cooperation with more than ten domestic and overseas universities, enterprises, public institutions, and other organizations. It has also carried out faculty and student visiting programs, as well as joint undergraduate and postgraduate training programs. Its model for cultivating international, interdisciplinary, and application-oriented foreign language talent has become increasingly mature, and the School is better positioned than ever to cultivate high-caliber foreign language professionals with a strong sense of national identity, cultural awareness, cross-linguistic and cross-cultural competence, and the ability to meet the needs of international communication and social development.

In addition to cultivating students within the School, it also undertakes teaching responsibilities for all postgraduate and undergraduate students across the University in areas such as professional foreign languages, college foreign languages, and literary appreciation. The languages offered include Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, German, French, and Russian. It has made comprehensive efforts to improve the quality of foreign language education through graded and categorized instruction, teaching reform, participation in academic competitions, upgrades to computer-based testing systems, development of grassroots teaching organizations, faculty team building, and improvement of the teaching and research environment.

The School places great emphasis on enhancing both teaching competence and students’ learning ability through competitions. More than 30 individual faculty members and teaching teams have won awards, including provincial first prizes, in competitions such as the Shandong Provincial Teaching Innovation Competition, the Shandong Provincial Young University Teachers’ Teaching Competition, the “SFLEP Cup” National College Foreign Language Teaching Contest, and the FLTRP “Star Teacher” Contest. Faculty members have also guided students to win national and provincial awards in competitions such as the “Challenge Cup” College Student Competition, the “Internet +” College Student Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition, the Shandong Provincial College Student Science and Technology Innovation Competition, College Student Innovation and Entrepreneurship Projects and the “FLTRP·ETIC Cup” “Understanding Contemporary China” National College Students’ Foreign Language Competence Contest. In various teaching competitions, the School has won 4 national awards and 13 provincial awards, and has guided students to win 11 national awards and more than 600 provincial awards in academic competitions.

All faculty members and students of the School remain committed to the University motto of “cultivating virtue and aspiration, honoring practice and competence.” With enthusiasm, determination, and diligence, they will continue to contribute to the University’s goal of building itself into a domestically first-class and internationally influential applied research-oriented university with engineering as its main strength and coordinated development across multiple disciplines.