At the invitation of the CFL, Professor Ning Chunyan, a noted linguist, gave a lecture on “Internal Language and External Language” at our school’s Comprehensive Building on July 7, 2015. Those who attended the lecture included Dean Zheng Xianri, Deputy Dean Cui Xuebo, Professor Zhang Zhen’ai, Professor Nan Chengyu and more than 100 teachers and students. In his lecture, Professor Ning interpreted the difference between language competence and language performance by a series of vivid examples. He pointed out that the language competence behind the language performance possesses the biological genetic properties. And it works through the common language knowledge or “mental structure”. Then he distinguished the difference and association between internal language and external language. Internal language is about the internal things in our minds, including human phonetic features, knowledge of sense relations and the management of the input of environment and language. It has the ability to externalize the knowledge into concrete language, and through the externalization, it will transform into external language. On the same afternoon, Professor Ning Chunyan gave a lecture on “Interesting Research Problems” at the Comprehensive Building. He explained such issues as biolinguistics, syntax, language acquisition, language assessment and foreign language acquisition. He met with doctoral and master’s supervisors in English language and literature and made some suggestions on the development of the doctoral program in this regard. Professor Ning Chunyan received his PhD from the Linguistics Department of California University, US. He was a Fulbright visiting scholar at MIT from 1985 to 1986, a researcher of ANU from 1985 to 1986, a professor and director of the Language Institute at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies from 1993 to 1996, a visiting scholar at City University of Hong Kong from 1995 to 1996, a professor and doctoral supervisor at the Foreign Language College of Hunan Normal University from 2000 to 2001, a professor and doctoral supervisor at Cognitive Science Institute of Hunan University since 2001, and a foregoer of the linguistics discipline at CFL of Tianjin Normal University since 2008. In addition, he once was the executive chief editor of the key journal Modern Foreign Language and works for some academic journals as an editorial board member. He has also undertaken some key social science projects.