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In the world's current political and economic climate, achieving proficiency in the use of foreign languages is a major imperative; and it was in order to meet this demand that, in April 2000, Kansai University established its Institute of Foreign Language Education and Research. The Institute's primary goal is to provide a training in communicative proficiency in foreign-language use suited to the great range of roles that Kansai University graduates will go on to undertake on the global stage. The languages offered are English, German, French, Russian, Spanish, Chinese, Korean and Japanese.
The Institute places emphasis on the nurturing of students empowered by a proper understanding of what it takes to communicate successfully in a foreign language. We aim to help our students learn how to interact with people from other cultures in a manner that is both responsible and sensitive.
The Institute's faculty comprises 37 tenured staffmembers, of whom six are native speakers of the languages they teach. In addition, we have 12 full-time Special Foreign Language Instructors and 383 part-time teachers. All teachers bring with them a rich background of experience, be that the experience of growing up or studying in another culture or that of having attained fluency in a foreign language. The research conducted by staff-members cover a wide spectrum, which includes such areas as didactics, testing-theory, the development of digital media resources, cultural and literary studies, and such areas of linguistics as phonetics, and formal, cognitive, and applied linguistics. Our program is kept up to date by this on-going research, which ensures that course-content is both sound and innovative. In this way, the Institute is making its contribution to the University's mission of enabling its students to evolve into useful and active members of the internationalized, IT-based society of the twenty-first century.
