In our two-year and four-year programs, we educate our students to become business professionals with advanced Japanese communication skills.  We adopted new curriculum during 2010 to increase the number of English and business-related courses.  The two-year program has more business management and English courses as a continuation from the five-year program.  In terms of our course offerings, we use the latest Japanese teaching materials to provide our students with opportunities to learn new knowledge, and our faculty teaches our students methods to better function in a multi-lingual industrial society. 

New courses

        We recently offer new courses such as Japanese Business Presentation, Meetings and Discussion in Japanese, Business Work and Internet Information, English-Japanese Translation, English-Japanese Communication Skills, Proposal Design in Japanese, Introduction to English-Japanese Contract, and Industrial Japanese. Our faculty members work hard to develop and produce their specialized teaching materials. 

Small class system

        We offer small a class system, with about twenty-five students in each class, in specialized courses in our department such as Japanese Conversation, English Conversation, Readings in Japanese, Japanese Phonetics, Writings in Japanese, Translation in Japanese, Readings and Discussion in Japanese, Japanese Presentation, Japanese Business Presentation, and Meetings and Discussion in Japanese.  Due to the small class system, our faculty can offer lessons based on students’ needs.

Excellent Japanese and bilingual faculties

        Our department has many full-time and part-time Japanese faculty members.  Many bilingual professors and instructors also teach in our department. Faculty members, whose native language is Japanese, are in charge of teaching Japanese Conversation courses.  We also hire native speakers to teach the English Conversation courses.  All of our faculty members have not only a specialized knowledge in foreign language education, but also have passion about teaching.  Our students improve their communicative competency and fluency by interacting with their native speaking instructors.  Moreover, they can deepen their understanding of different cultures and broaden their world view.  We also offer an excellent learning environment for educating our students to be able to function in an international society through their regular communications with Taiwanese and Japanese faculty who are fluent in English and Japanese.  Students can further enhance their English skills by taking an English-Japanese Translation course or a Presentation in English course with our excellent faculty. 

Cutting edge learning facilities

        We work hard to provide specialized classrooms with the latest software and hardware.  We expect our students to more efficiently enhance their learning outcomes by actively using these special classrooms.  We currently offer an e-learning classroom so that our students can study for themselves in addition to the other fourteen specialized classroom.

Study abroad program

        We offer our students various opportunities to study in Japan.  Our core program is an exchange program with several Japanese universities.  Additionally, we also provide short-stay programs such as visiting Tokyo and Osaka, learning in Kyoto, Internships in Kagoshima and others.  Through these opportunities, students can earn Japanese living experiences and broaden their world view. They can also motivate themselves to improve their Japanese proficiency level in practical settings. 

Inter-disciplinary courses

        We received a grant from the Ministry of Education to offer an inter-disciplinary two-year course, “Computer Japanese” with cooperation of the Department of Information Engineering.  Information engineering students can take Japanese language education, while Japanese-major students can take classes from the Department of Information Engineering.  Thus, students in both departments can simultaneously take two classes in these departments.  The courses include: An Introduction to Computer, Computer Program Language, Computer Internet, Seminar in IT, Operational System, Data Base System, An Introduction to Multi-media, Mobile Communication Network, and Internet and Application.  These classes comprise a total of twenty-seven credits.  We invite instructors from various industrial fields and students will often visit these companies to cultivate their secondary specialized skills.

Company visits and internships

        We offer various company visits (旭硝子、裕隆NISSAN、友達光電、

三洋電子等國際企業外，至大發金屬、外貿協會、樂田股份有限公司 etc.) and provide training at national natural history museum and internships at companies to be useful for students’ job hunting. 

Various extra-curricular activities

        Our students actively bring new ideas to their classes.  They engage in various activities to attentively learn about various matters related to Japan. 

        Chatting hour (Oshaberi-tei)

        Students can have lunch with our Japanese full-time faculty during the lunch hour in a relaxed atmosphere to improve their oral communication skills. 

        Cultural festival

        We have Japanese cultural events and artifacts such as a tea ceremony, drums, Japanese traditional dance, origami, and flower arrangements along with our school festival held every December.  To further develop our students’ awareness of Japanese culture, we also provide a Japanese eating manners lesson, Japanese movie appreciation and academic lectures.

        Acting contest

        Our five-year program hosts regular English and Japanese drama contests every year. Students write their own scripts and rehearse for their stage performances by themselves.  Such contests are very helpful for students to improve their bilingual communication abilities and problem-solving skills by closely forming a sense of solidarity and camaraderie.  

        Drama contest

        Students in the two-year and four-year programs shoot their original films based on a yearly theme and submit their work to the department for judging.  Students have the opportunity to reflect on their lives and consider concepts of reality and idealism through engaging in this project.  

        Our educational goals

        Our department consists of three programs: the five-year program, the two-year program, and the four-year program.  The five-year program belongs to the vocational section, and two-year and four-year programs belong to the university section. Each program’s goals are listed below:

 1)      The five-year program

We follow the policy created when this departmental program was established in 1980. That is to develop education in the three fields of Japanese, English, and business as a core curriculum.  We aim to provide our students with an excellent education in these fields to develop a high level of proficiency in each skill.  The curriculums are not only structured for students to learn the basic content of these courses, which was decided by the Ministry of Education, but also to present specialized courses, theoretical frameworks, and practicum experiences. The minimum credits required for graduation are 246. 

 2)      The two-year and four-year programs 

We aim to educate our students to be able to work in a business field with an advanced proficiency level by learning Japanese, business and work ethics.  Those two-year or four-year program students who have already mastered basic communication skills in Japanese at high school can improve their four Japanese communication skills (speaking, listening, reading, and writing) and interpretation/translation skills.  Students can also improve their linguistic knowledge and specialized knowledge by registering for specialized courses such as Business, Japanese Culture, Japanese Pedagogy, English related courses, and data processing courses.  In order to graduate, the two-year program requires minimum of 74 credits.  The four-year program requires 142 credits for graduation. Please refer to the curriculum plans in details.

Faculty

        We currently have twenty-one full-time faculty members (four Japanese and 17 Taiwanese).  Each faculty member has his or her own specialty (please refer to faculty section), and possesses a great passion for teaching and conducting research studies.  They improve their teaching and research skills through their continuous professional development.  We consider our faculty as our most significant human resources. 

Facilities

        Facilities are divided into three categories. 

Audio-visual materials:

52 sets of tape teaching materials, 126 learning videos, 18 DVDs, DCR camera, digital camera, 2 projectors, 3 Notebook computers, 3 recording pens, 2 wirelesses microphones, and 6 wired microphones.  These materials are used in lessons as well as recording events in our department.

Specialized classroom: 

In order to enhance students’ learning outcomes, we currently have a library/visual-audio room, Japanese culture center, Chinese language learning center for the Japanese, interpretation classroom, presentation classroom, interactive language learning classroom, e-learning classroom, and 6 language learning classrooms. 

Books:                       

We have 25,742 Japanese books including literature, history, dictionaries, books related to Japanese language proficiency testing, Japanese culture, Japanese society, and so on. These books are used to enhance teaching and learning.  In addition to these books, we monthly purchase 68 kinds of specialized   magazines.   

        Our future vision

        We consider it highly important to support our students in obtaining an advanced proficiency in Japanese, a strong knowledge of business, and the practical skills necessary to meet the increased demands from enterprise for high quality human resources and to meet diverse requirements of our country’s economic developmental goals.

We work hard in the following three areas to accomplish these goals:

1)      We aim to educate our students by providing practical skills through interchanges between our department and companies or corporations within varied industrial fields. 

2)      We aim to arrange a Japanese language learning environment and developing Japanese teaching materials for adult learners through fostering cooperation between our college of continuing education, open college of continuing education, and extension education division.