DISTINGUISHING FEATURES
Unlike the foreign language departments in other Taiwanese universities, which tend to focus solely on literature and/or linguistics, our department boasts a curriculum that emphasizes variety and flexibility. We capitalize on the expertise of the university's other departments, providing students with an excellent environment for interdisciplinary research and education. Students can choose to take elective or minor courses in linguistics, literatures, and translation, or even computer science, management or other disciplines. Apart from being the first of its kind in Taiwan, this training prepares students for a wider variety of occupational choices upon graduation.
Undergraduate Program Characteristics
Our department stresses balanced development in language proficiency, literature, and linguistics. General proficiency courses are offered in the first two years of the program, while the latter two are spent on individualized guidance to ensure students' ability to conduct independent research and produce original, analytical research papers. Students are provided with a multi-faceted, autonomous English learning environment, with numerous extracurricular activities to participate in. Catering to community needs, we also provide training in various aspects of translation, including general translating skills, consecutive translation, simultaneous interpretation, translation criticism, translation theories, and so on.
The Graduate Institute of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics offers classes in the realms of literary and linguistic study. Our institute can not only help arm students with sufficient preparations to face the competitive job market after graduation, but also, through our advanced courses, hone the skills of future academic researchers or English professionals.
Graduate Program – Literature Component Characteristics
Our literature component is again characterized by its variety and flexibility. Courses covering the accepted canons in English, American and European literatures are offered in such a way that they reinforce each other. Students are exposed to basic texts, authors, periods and concepts in Western literature. To ensure that students relate themselves to discipline, subjects in cultural criticism are also introduced—these include courses dealing with but not limited to gender and literature, literature and culture, film and literature, and post-modernism and post-colonialism. We have also founded a Film Studies Center to better provide students with film theory and visual culture resources.
Graduate Program – Linguistics Component Characteristics
The linguistics component aims to provide students with basic analytical skills to investigate various language structures and uses. We instruct our students in the importance of combining theory and empirical evidence, and we also emphasize linguistics’ connection with varied interdisciplinary regions. Generative and functionalist grammars are both given equal weight in our course curriculum. In addition to required courses covering different aspects of language (e.g. syntax, phonetics, phonology, and semantics), specialized courses are offered in the areas of sociolinguistics, neurolinguistics, corpus linguistics, dialectology, and so on.
