Director Xiumin ZHAO
The Center for Culture and Language Education (CCLE) was established within the Tohoku University Institute for Excellence in Higher Education (IEHE) in April of 2014 as the core organization to deal with Japanese and foreign language education at the university. The CCLE carries out the important role of contributing to the improvement of the quality of higher education by researching, developing, planning, implementing, and managing language courses.
The CCLE also aims to foster cross-cultural understanding and the acquisition of broad communication skills, which function as the foundation of university-level liberal arts education. In today’s world of increasing internationalization and ever-more complex international relations, high-level language ability, intercultural competency, and global leadership are essential skills to develop the ability to identify and solve problems. Therefore, there are increasing demands placed on the higher education of language and culture to train students to be internationally minded, having diverse sets of values, global worldviews, and linguistic abilities that expand beyond their first language.
As the core educational organization for language education at this university, we employ teachers of Japanese, English, German, French, Spanish, Chinese, and Korean. We teach general education foreign language classes, Japanese language classes for foreign exchange students, develop language education programs through processes of evaluating and improvement, and develop programs to increase the teaching potential of our staff. English for General Academic Purposes (EGAP) will be especially important going forward from 2024 after being named as a “University of International Research Excellence.” It will also become critical that we create and maintain English education systems that help to improve comprehensive English skills into students’ upper-level classes. Additionally, we also strive to research, develop, implement, and manage the Japanese language classes that serve the ever-increasing body of international students, and the Plurilingual Studies Program for learners of additional languages.
The CCLE is committed to bringing together the collective expertise of its faculty to contribute to the improvement and development of higher education language and culture, ceaselessly striving for the improvement of language education.