The Central Laboratory for Foreign Language Teaching was established in 2006. The Laboratory attaches great importance to the integration of foreign language teaching and computer-assisted language learning (CALL) besides foreign language teaching and research. Constructed with the support from the comprehensive and fast-growing resources from the School of Foreign Languages and Shenzhen University, the Laboratory was listed as a “Provincial Model Experimental Teaching Center Construction Project” in 2019.
Currently, the laboratory employs 131 lab instructors, technicians and managerial and operational personnel, boasting a highly professional crew with a good mix of age brackets who can adapt to the needs of modern CALL teaching. The center takes up 2500 square meters of laboratory space for its modern language and college English laboratories, with 12.65 million yuan worth of equipment (including software). The central lab consists of a variety of offices with advanced equipment, including the language learning laboratory, the audio learning laboratory, simultaneous interpreting room, multi-media language teaching room, 3D virtual video studio, and the phonetic analysis laboratory, scattered across Yuehai and Lihu campuses. There are 11 sets of teaching and laboratory management software, 1,766 pieces of equipment, and 1,030 CALL seats for students. As of July 2019, 45 CALL courses of foreign language could be offered simultaneously, with 13,139 students attending the labs annually and a total of 477,608 CALL hours spent there. The Lab's various CALL systems are visited more than 1.6 million times annually. We undertake the CALL-powered curriculum for more than 1,100 undergraduate students majoring in English, Japanese, French, German and Spanish; and for more than 6,000 undergraduate students attending college English courses. We are also responsible for collecting and analyzing the online teaching evaluation data of all foreign language courses for more than 10,000 undergraduate and graduate students.
The Laboratory succinctly follows the requirements of The Outline of National Medium and Long-term education Reforms and development Program (2010-2020); as well as Instructions on Accelerating the Construction of High-level Undergraduate Education and Comprehensively Improving the Capacity of Talent Cultivation and National Standards for Teaching Quality of Foreign Language and Literature Undergraduate Programs by the Ministry of Education, and acts in accordance with the university’s mission of high-level university construction, foreign language discipline construction, and talent training. We strive to build a central CALL laboratory of excellency on a national level, provides strong support to the teaching and learning of students from foreign language departments as well as the College English Department, and becomes a flagship language lab with outstanding distinctive features.
