The Graduate Academic Programs Department was established in March 2013. It is primarily responsible for the recruitment and cultivation of academic master's and doctoral students, as well as corresponding course instruction and graduation degree review. After years of development, the department has built a strong faculty team, currently consisting of 17 professors, 30 associate professors, 39 doctoral degree holders, 1 national-level distinguished teacher, and 5 provincial-level distinguished teachers and outstanding educators.
Over the past five years, the department has secured more than 100 provincial and ministerial-level research projects, including those funded by the National Social Science Fund, the Ministry of Education Humanities and Social Sciences Fund, and the Guangdong Provincial Social Science Fund. The total research funding received exceeds 10 million RMB. Faculty members have published nearly 200 papers in SSCI, A&HCI, and CSSCI-indexed journals, including prestigious domestic and international publications such as Learning & Instruction, Discourse & Society, Language Learning & Technology, System, Lexicos, Foreign Language Teaching and Research, Foreign Literature Review, Foreign Languages, Modern Foreign Languages, Chinese Translators Journal, and Foreign Literature Studies. Additionally, more than 50 academic monographs have been published.
Within the first-level discipline of Foreign Languages and Literature, the department has developed a relatively comprehensive and distinctive framework comprising four major research directions: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Foreign Literature, Cross-Cultural and Translation Studies, and Country and Regional Studies.
Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics: This direction covers languages such as English, Japanese, French, and German, focusing on theoretical research in areas like stylistics and applied linguistics issues such as foreign language textbook development and language testing. It has twice received National Teaching Achievement Awards. Key subfields include stylistics, cognitive linguistics, functional linguistics, second language acquisition, and corpus linguistics. The distinctive strength of this direction lies in applying theories from stylistics, cognitive linguistics, and corpus linguistics to explore stylistic and grammatical construction similarities, differences, and mechanisms across languages, as well as investigating the acquisition of English and Chinese grammatical structures by second language learners.
Foreign Literature: This direction primarily involves the study of literary history, writers, and works from countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, France, and Germany, as well as Western cultural trends and literary aesthetics. Its distinctive feature is the application of contemporary literary theories to analyze foreign novels, poetry, and drama, with a focus on writers and works such as Faulkner, Hardy, Dickinson, and Larkin. Significant achievements have been made in theoretical exploration, textual analysis, and translation. In literary aesthetics, the focus is on the relationship between literature and the world, particularly the historicity of literature, literary ethics, and subjectivity in literature.
Cross-Cultural and Translation Studies: This direction encompasses discourse and cultural communication studies, cultural comparison, and translation research. It emphasizes the use of cultural theories and discourse analysis to explore similarities and differences between Chinese and foreign cultures, as well as mechanisms of cultural context reconstruction. The research aims to advance cross-cultural and translation studies within a global perspective, promote the international dissemination of Chinese culture through translation, and contribute to national strategies such as the Belt and Road Initiative.
Country and Regional Studies: As an interdisciplinary research direction cultivated within the department's Country and Regional Studies Center, this area leverages commissioned projects undertaken by the Ministry of Education's Country and Regional Studies Centers. Its goal is to address major national strategic needs through strategic, forward-looking, and original research, fulfilling functions such as academic research, consultancy services, talent cultivation, and international exchange.
The department consistently adheres to the principle of moral education as the priority, fostering virtue through education and has cultivated a large number of high-level foreign language professionals. In recent years, the academic team has firmly implemented the spirit of the National Conference on Ideological and Political Work in Higher Education, deepened the Two Studies, One Action initiative, improved ideological and political education systems and evaluation mechanisms, and steadfastly carried out all tasks to cultivate qualified builders and reliable successors of socialism with Chinese characteristics. In recent years, the employment rate of graduates has remained at 100%, with 21% of master's graduates pursuing doctoral degrees at prestigious domestic and international institutions.
Faculty Profiles: http://sites.scut.edu.cn/sfl/1334/list.psp
Director of the Graduate Academic Programs Department: Chen Yanyan
Contact: cyyscut@163.com
Mailing Address: School of International Languages, South China University of Technology, 381 Wushan Road, Tianhe District, Guangzhou (Postal Code: 510640)
