In order to cater for teaching and research needs of undergraduates and graduates at the School of Foreign Languages and to promote the integration of teaching and scientific research, the Institute of Applied Linguistics was founded in September 2008. After nearly 10 years of construction and development, the research goals and objectives of the Institute can be summarized as: (1) the integration of language and literature and foreign language teaching idea; (2) teacher education practice combined with primary and secondary school teaching; (3) the innovative foreign language teaching equipped with education technology.

Regular activities are organized by this institute to conduct exchanges with academic groups and colleagues at home and abroad. Various approaches are made to explore new perspectives and new paths of applied linguistics development so as to jointly reveal, parsing, reflect on and improve the development trend of foreign language teaching in the context of Chinese culture and internationalization context. The institute seeks to build the following cultural characteristics: (1) with applied linguistics as the general direction, interdisciplinary collaboration is carried out in different fields of education teaching; (2) with academic research as the core, backbone teachers excellent at both teaching and research are cultivated in the team as the focus.

In view of the characteristics of applied linguistics research, the institute focuses on multi-level researches combined with practice and theory, penetrated in all aspects of cross-cultural studies and foreign language teaching.