From 24 to 26 February 2023, the 5th SFLEP Cup National College Students’ Intercultural Competence Contest was successfully held in Shanghai. The competition attracted 1,488 students from nearly 500 universities across China. Our school team, guided by teachers Li Hui and Jin Yi from SFL, consisted of Hu Junhao, a 2021 undergraduate majoring in Spanish, Xu Liming, a 2021 undergraduate majoring in Japanese, and Luo Ying, a 2019 undergraduate majoring in Journalism. In the highly competitive final, the team performed well and won the National Grand Prize (3rd place), which was the highest award won by our school in the previous competitions.

In June 2022, under the guidance of teachers Li Hui and Jin Yi from the University English Teaching Department, our team members underwent nearly half a year of training to comprehensively improve the cross-cultural theories and analytical skills.

In the National Final’s sessions, this student team analyzed examples from the dimensions of cultural synergy, cultural context and cultural mistranslation. With excellent language skills, creative ability and tacit cooperation, they excelled in all the sessions of quick questions and answers, impromptu case commentary and telling Chinese stories, and won the third place of the National Grand Prize with an overall score of 89.94. Two teachers, Mr Li Hui and Ms Jin Yi, were awarded the Mentor Award.

The integration of foreign language skills and intercultural competence development has become an important feature of foreign language education in the new era. ECNU has achieved many successes in the previous national finals. This reflects the strength of the intercultural competition team and the School of Foreign Languages in cultivating complex foreign language talents with Chinese sensibilities, international perspectives and intercultural communication skills.