On the afternoon of October 24, 2025, the School of Foreign Languages and Cultures and the Institute of Social Sciences at Jilin University jointly hosted the 1,261st installment of the University's Academic Lecture Series on Philosophy and Social Sciences. Held in Lecture Hall 500 of the Foreign Languages Building, the event welcomed Professor Yang Lianrui—Honorary Dean of the School of Foreign Languages at the Ocean University of China and a Senior Research Scholar at the University of Cambridge—who delivered a talk titled “Systemic Reflections on China’s Second Language Acquisition Research: An Independent Knowledge System Perspective”.
Professor Yang opened by arguing that foreign language and literature studies form an essential pillar of China’s broader knowledge system in the humanities and social sciences, making the development of an independent, homegrown framework for the field a matter of genuine strategic importance. He offered a candid assessment of the challenges confronting foreign language scholarship in China, noting that the discipline has long been shaped by its perceived role as a mere “tool” and by an overreliance on imported theory. This dependence, he argued, has left the field in a state of “heteronomy” that stifles original scholarship. Research and teaching in foreign languages, he contended, must instead grapple with real problems, respond to the country's pressing strategic needs, and address the questions that lie at the heart of both the discipline and the nation's development.
Drawing on his own work, Professor Yang used his original textbook, An Introduction to Second Language Acquisition: The Science of How Chinese Learners Acquire Foreign Languages, to trace the field through four stages of development—contrastive analysis, error analysis, interlanguage, and the study of English as a lingua franca. Throughout, he said, his aim has been to keep Chinese learners at the center of the inquiry, drawing on the wealth of language-learning experience accumulated since the reform and opening-up era to address what it actually means, scientifically speaking, for Chinese speakers to learn a foreign language.
Grounded in extensive empirical research, Professor Yang continued, China's SLA scholarship is well positioned to break new theoretical ground and make a distinctive contribution to the international field. He laid out a dynamic, systems-based view of acquisition—one in which multiple contexts and variables interact—and suggested that this approach could anchor a theory of second language acquisition with distinctly Chinese characteristics.
The lecture drew an engaged audience and offered substantial food for thought, broadening participants' perspectives while lending fresh momentum to efforts to build an independent knowledge system for foreign language studies in China. Many attendees described the session as highly rewarding and expressed hope for more academic exchanges of this caliber in the future.
