The College of Foreign Languages in Ocean University of China traces its origins to the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of the School of Literature, founded in 1930 when the university was known as National Qingdao University. Its first head was Mr. Liang Shiqiu, a renowned Chinese literary scholar and translator. In 1993, the department was renamed the College of Foreign Languages. Its successive deans have been Professor Yang Zijian, a distinguished scholar of English–Chinese contrastive studies and translation; Professor Zhang Delu, a leading scholar of functional linguistics; and Professor Yang Lianrui, a well-known expert in second language acquisition and the president of the China Association for Second Language Acquisition Research. The current dean is Professor Yu Guodong, a leading expert in pragmatics and conversation analysis.

The College currently has 154 faculty and staff members. Among them are 126 full-time teachers (including 11 resident foreign language instructors), 22 professors, 36 associate professors, and 17 doctoral supervisors. In addition, the College has recruited 9 internationally renowned scholars, 6 of whom rank among the world’s top 2% of language scientists. Its faculty includes recipients of honours such as National Outstanding Teacher, National Advanced Individual in Textbook Development, National Advanced Individual in the “Three Aspects of Educating People” (teaching, management, and service), New Century Excellent Talent of the Ministry of Education, the State Council Special Government Allowance, Shandong Provincial Model Educator, provincial and municipal Distinguished Teachers, and the Shandong Provincial Huang Danian-style University Teaching Team. Committed to strengthening itself through talent, the College has in recent years recruited 4 scholars under the “Prosperity Talent Programme”, 2 professors, and 27 young teachers and faculty-track postdoctoral fellows under the “Young Talent Programme”. It also engages 3 development advisors for the foreign language discipline, all distinguished scholars in China; 9 professors under the “Distinguished Talent Programme”, all renowned scholars from abroad; and 21 adjunct professors, all well-known experts and professors from home and abroad. Through sustained effort, the College has steadily improved the structure of its faculty and significantly raised the standard of its team development.

The College comprises the Department of English, the Department of Japanese, the Department of Korean, the Department of French, the Department of German, and the Department of College Foreign Language Teaching. It offers instruction in seven languages, with Russian and Spanish taught alongside the five departmental languages. The College currently has 875 undergraduate students, 393 master’s students, and 90 doctoral students. It hosts a postdoctoral research station in Foreign Languages and Literatures, first-level doctoral and master’s degree programmes in the discipline, and a professional Master of Translation and Interpreting (MTI) programme, forming a complete bachelor’s–master’s–doctoral pathway in the discipline and talent development. It has been approved as a key base for Foreign Languages and Literatures under Shandong Province’s 12th Five-Year Plan, and as the province’s only innovation platform for the discipline under the 13th Five-Year Plan. Foreign Languages and Literatures is a key development discipline of Ocean University of China. In 2020, the discipline was selected as a high-level discipline with distinctive strengths in Shandong Province, the only one of its kind. In 2022, it ranked in the top 15% nationwide in the Shanghai Ranking subject rankings, and in the fifth round of China’s national discipline evaluation it placed in the top 20%, among the leading programmes in the country. It is an important base for cultivating high-level innovative talents in foreign language studies in China, and one of the eight disciplines that the university has prioritised in its 14th Five-Year Plan for building into a national first-class discipline.

Guided by the fundamental task of fostering virtue through education, the College serves national strategies and social needs. It aims to cultivate versatile, high-level foreign language professionals with a strong sense of devotion to the nation, a global outlook, and professional competence, following the guiding principle of “helping China better engage with the world and helping the world better understand China”, and it has steadily improved the quality of its talent development. The College has implemented a “Five Collaborations” model for cultivating high-level innovative foreign language talents, aligning disciplines with national strategies, teams with leading international scholars, research projects with high-quality courses, outcomes with social needs, and teaching processes with training quality. This model won a Second Prize of the 2022 National Teaching Achievement Award for Higher Education (Graduate). All five of the College’s undergraduate programmes have made the list of high-level programme development, achieving full coverage by first-class programmes. Of these, the English, Japanese, and Korean programmes have been selected as national first-class undergraduate programme development sites, and the French and German programmes as Shandong provincial first-class undergraduate programme development sites.

The College has always pursued quality-oriented development and promoted teaching through research, fostering a vibrant research culture. It hosts research institutes including the Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures, the Institute of Second Language Acquisition and Teaching, the Institute of Translation Studies, the Institute of Linguistics, the Institute of European and American Literature, the Institute of Intercultural Communication, the Haruki Murakami Research Institute, the Centre for Country and Regional Studies, the Centre for Korean Studies, and the Language and Brain Science Laboratory, and it publishes the journal Foreign Language Research in China. In 2014, the China International Communications Group established the Ocean University of China research base of the Sidney Shapiro Research Centre. In 2017, the Centre for Korean Studies was approved for registration as a Ministry of Education Centre for Country and Regional Studies. In 2018, following Guangdong University of Foreign Studies and Beijing Foreign Studies University, the College became the chairing institution of the Second Language Acquisition Research Committee of the China Association for Comparative Studies of English and Chinese. In 2022, the Interdisciplinary Research Laboratory for Second Language Acquisition was selected as one of the first Category A university laboratories in the humanities and social sciences, the only one of its kind in foreign language world of Shandong Province. In recent years, the College has achieved impressive results in both research and teaching. Its faculty have led more than 40 projects funded by the National Social Science Fund of China and the Ministry of Education’s humanities and social sciences funds, including 2 key projects of the National Social Science Fund, and 12 international collaborative projects, with total research funds of RMB 15 million. They have published more than 160 academic monographs, nationally planned textbooks, and translations, and over 300 papers in SSCI, CSSCI, and other core journals, and have won more than 20 national, provincial, and ministerial teaching and research awards, including the Second Prize of the National Teaching Achievement Award in 2022.

The College has always attached great importance to the development of a sound teaching and learning culture and to all-round education, and it actively promotes internationalised undergraduate teaching. It regularly hosts and organises high-level, specialised national and international academic conferences, and each year invites more than 50 renowned scholars and experts from home and abroad to give academic lectures. It actively pursues international exchange and cooperation, having established broad academic cooperation and joint-training relationships with more than 20 universities in countries including the United States, Australia, Japan, the Republic of Korea, France, and Germany, and each year a large number of its students study abroad. In recent years, students of all programmes have excelled in various competitions, maintaining a pass rate above 98% in the national Band 4 and Band 8 examinations for foreign language majors; their scores in the College English Test Band 4 and Band 6 have consistently ranked among the best; and they have won outstanding results in national English speech and debate competitions such as the CCTV Cup, the 21st Century Cup, and the FLTRP Cup.

The College is equipped with an advanced digital language teaching and research centre, featuring a large-scale immersive VR virtual-simulation language training laboratory, simultaneous-interpretation multimedia language laboratory, the Shandong Provincial Category A university laboratory in the humanities and social sciences - the Interdisciplinary Research Laboratory for Second Language Acquisition, and Language Big Data Laboratory. It also houses a foreign language testing centre under the Ministry of Education, which administers a wide range of national and international examinations, including IELTS, TOEFL, GRE, GMAT, BEC, the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test (JLPT), J-TEST, and the Test of Proficiency in Korean (TOPIK), providing high-quality services for the cultivation of international talents. In addition, the College has established off-campus practical training bases in partnership with institutions including China Today magazine of the China International Communications Group, The World of English magazine of the Commercial Press, China Translation & Publishing Corporation, the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, the Foreign Affairs Office of the Qingdao Municipal Government, and the Ocean University of China Press.

More than 50% of the College’s graduates with a bachelor’s degree go on to pursue master’s and doctoral degrees at leading Chinese universities. Employment prospects are excellent, with the employment rate consistently above 90%. Graduates have a solid disciplinary foundation, strong theoretical grounding, a well-structured body of knowledge, strong practical skills, and high overall quality, together with great potential for continued growth. They are well prepared for and perform outstandingly in challenging positions in education, foreign affairs, diplomacy, international trade, finance, journalism, publishing and other departments.

Updated on Nov. 6, 2026