The history of the Department of Foreign Languages is more than 60 years long. During World War II the Department was headed by Iryna Huzar and studies were held secretly. The official information about the Department first appeared in 1945 when the Department was headed by A.A. Sheikina.
In 1992 the Department comprised 5 sections, they were sections of English, German, Romanic (French and Spanish), Japanese languages, and a section of language studies (Ukrainian and Russian) for foreign students. In 1980 the group of learning Japanese started working at the Department, headed by assistant professor A.R. Medvediv.
In 1995 the Department won the contest for participating in the Preliminary project and in 1996 it took part in TEMPUS-TACIS project of European Community. Both projects were funded by EU, the sum of financing being 1.5 million ECU. In the scopes of these projects, teachers and students of Lviv Polytechnic were given the opportunity to undergo internship at the Universities of Great Britain and Germany; 12 training manuals, 2 information brochures about Lviv Polytechnic, an English-Ukrainian dictionary were published. There were also published 2 textbooks for students with the recommendation of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine: “Getting On in English” (edited by P. Corness and N. Haiduk) and “Kommunikatives Deutsch” (edited by V. Zadorozhnyi, Th. Seifert, F. Spitzner, M. Vesna).
More than 60 teachers of the Department undertook training in Austria, Great Britain, Canada, Germany, Poland, the USA, France, and Japan. The members of the staff participated in 15 international programs, and this allowed inviting prominent scholars and university teachers from these countries to Lviv Polytechnic.
Since 1992 more than 40 training manuals and textbooks for learning English, German, French, Japanese and Latin with recommendations from the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine have been published.
In 2011, within The Project of the English Language Teaching, the Agreement on Cooperation between the US Peace Corps in Ukraine and Lviv Polytechnic National University was concluded. A Peace Corps volunteer Byron Williams worked at the Department for 2 years. He conducted optional English courses for students, methodical workshops for teachers, trainings for advanced students, summer English language schools.
Today the Department is the structural unit of the Institute of Humanities and Social Studies of Lviv Polytechnic National University. The teaching staff of the Department that varied from 55 to 97 teachers in different years is one the largest among philological units in the system of higher education of Ukraine.