FAR EASTERN PUBLICATIONS, YALE UNIVERSITY

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About FEP Far Eastern Publications of Yale University is a publisher of books, audio programs, computer software and other learning aids for the study of Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Now located on the Yale University campus at 434 Temple Street, its beginnings go back over a half a century to the time of the Second World War, when there was a need for materials and courses to study languages such as Chinese and Japanese, then so critical to the war effort. In 1943 a group of accomplished teachers and researchers came together at Yale University and established there the Institute of Far Eastern Languages. The Institute, originally called the Chinese Language School, provided training in spoken Chinese for officers and enlisted men of the United States Army. Hundreds upon hundreds of Army personnel were trained in Chinese on the Yale campus. Two years later, in l945, the Institute began the training of civilians for service in various posts in the Far East and in l946, the first regularly enrolled Yale students also took courses sponsored by the Institute. Japanese was first taught in the Institute in l948. Other Asian languages, such as Burmese, Indonesian, Thai and Vietnamese were also regularly taught at the Institute. In the early forties, because of the urgent need to produce a large number of fluent speakers of these languages rapidly, the Institute sponsored a highly intensive learning program designed to train students in the basics of these languages in the short space of a few weeks. All instruction at the Institute was designed to be intensive and, as such, continued Yale's long history of important and practical work in the application of linguistics to language teaching. Very soon it was discovered that, in addition to new instructional techniques, new textbooks were needed. Thus it was in this environment that many of the basic texts and strategies for learning these languages, especially Chinese, were put together by this team of native language instructors, linguists and specialists in pedagogy. The type of instruction sponsored by the Institute has often been called the "Yale Method". At that time, because of the war, access to printing houses in the Far East was limited but thanks to a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, a printing press and Chinese printing fonts were purchased enabling the Institute to produce teaching materials in Chinese. These books not only serviced the needs of the center at Yale but were also distributed to other teaching centers all over the United States and the world by Far Eastern Publications, which was established as the printing and publishing arm of the Institute. In 1965, the Institute of Far Eastern Languages ceased to exist as a separate entity of the University and its language teaching functions were incorporated into the Department of East Asian Languages. The publishing tasks of the Institute were taken over by Far Eastern Publications, which established its headquarters at 28 Hillhouse Avenue, right in the center of the University. Since the seventies, Far Eastern has continuously published additional titles and remains to this day one of the world's leading publishers of texts to learn East Asian languages.