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History of the Department
Tamsui
Oxford
College
, the former
Aletheia
University
, was a three-year college with nine departments. One of them, the Department of Business and Secretarial Sciences offered both business-related and English courses to students who were interested in English and who were intending to pursue careers in the fields of international trade and business. In addition to Business English, students were required to take other English courses, such as Freshman English, English Translation, English Composition, English Conversation, and English Grammar. Many students in the department demonstrated their proficiency in English as they won numerous awards nationwide in English speech contests and became competent professionals after graduation.
In 1994 when the college was upgraded to
Tamsui
College
, a four-year college, the Department of Business and Secretarial Sciences stopped enrolling students. Although there were no English majors during that time, the “Committee of English Teaching and Research,” which had been operating very well for many years in the past, kept on working. All the full-time English instructors in the college were fully qualified and well experienced; therefore, the English Teachers’ Committee had laid a solid foundation for the future faculty of the Department of English. A year later, in 1995, the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature was born.
At that time, many of our graduates who applied for English teaching jobs responded to the college authority that when applying, they were often required to provide additional proof of their specialization in English; therefore, the college renamed the department as the “Department of English” to eliminate this confusion. In 2006, while applying to the Ministry of Education for the new department name, a clerical error left out the Chinese character “語” – Languages, and it turned out to be the “Department of English and American Literature,” the current name. As a result, we had to make another request to the Ministry of Education to have the department name corrected to the “Department of English.”
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