Interdisciplinary Compound Talent Cultivation Mechanism in Foreign Language Universities under New Liberal Arts

Sun Qi

Tianjin Foreign Studies University

Abstract：

Against the backdrop of high-quality connotative transformation in China’s higher education system, foreign language specialized universities are currently undergoing profound dual reforms driven by the national New Liberal Arts construction initiative and the comprehensive promotion of educational digitalization. Different from comprehensive universities with multi-disciplinary clusters, foreign language universities bear distinctive dual developmental missions: maintaining the inherent core disciplinary advantages of foreign language and cross-cultural education, while actively promoting substantive interdisciplinary integration and digital governance upgrading to adapt to evolving social and industrial talent demands. In recent years, the homogenization of school running positioning, rigid disciplinary management systems and disconnection between talent training planning and practical teaching implementation have become common bottlenecks restricting the high-quality development of “foreign language + interdisciplinary” compound talent cultivation. Most foreign language universities merely adopt simple curriculum superposition rather than in-depth organic integration, resulting in weakened school-running characteristics, low resource allocation efficiency and insufficient core competitiveness of graduates in foreign-related employment markets. Existing academic research in this field still has prominent structural deficiencies. On the one hand, most previous studies on higher education interdisciplinary talent training mainly focus on comprehensive research universities, ignoring the unique disciplinary structure, school-running orientation and talent training logic of foreign language specialized universities. On the other hand, mainstream academic discussions usually separate New Liberal Arts construction and educational digitalization into two independent research perspectives, failing to systematically explore their synergistic driving effect on optimizing interdisciplinary talent cultivation mechanisms. This obvious research gap leads to the lack of targeted theoretical support and practical guidance for foreign language universities’ talent training reform, causing many institutions to fall into the dilemma of isomorphic imitation and blind reform without clear directional focus. This study adopts a mixed research methodology combining policy text analysis and multi-case comparative empirical research. Six typical representative foreign language universities in China are selected as research samples, covering national key foreign language universities and local characteristic foreign language colleges. Based on the systematic sorting and in-depth coding of talent training planning documents, reform implementation reports and quality evaluation data from 2018 to 2023, combined with first-hand research data obtained through in-depth interviews with 28 teaching management and discipline construction directors, this paper comprehensively investigates the current situation, practical difficulties and core influencing factors of “foreign language + interdisciplinary” talent cultivation reform. The research results verify that high-quality talent training reform in excellent foreign language universities has formed a mature dual-core driving mechanism: New Liberal Arts construction reshapes the overall talent training goal system and interdisciplinary curriculum layout, and digital transformation optimizes the whole-process teaching implementation, daily management and quality evaluation process.

Key Words：

new liberal arts; educational digitalization; foreign language universities; interdisciplinary education; compound talent cultivation; training mechanism optimization