More pre-school bilingual teachers to Xinjiang countryside

Another batch of 5,257 bilingual pre-school teachers will be sent to the rural areas of northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, predominantly inhabited by Uygurs, as the government pushes for greater cultural integration in the region.

The teachers, after completing Mandarin-Uygur bilingual training, will be sent to a dozen prefectures in Xinjiang before Feb. 19 to teach in the bilingual rural kindergartens there, officials with regional education bureau said Tuesday.

China has allocated 1.52 billion yuan (243 million U.S. dollars) to fund the development of about 1,016 bilingual kindergartens across Xinjiang to bolster the language ability, especially the national tongue Mandarin, of pre-schoolers in the ethnic region.

The regional government in 2010 said it aimed to recruit 20,000 pre-school teachers in total. The first batch of 3,937 teachers entered the workforce that year, official said.

About 40 percent of Xinjiang's population are ethnic Uygurs who largely talk in only Uygur, especially in the countryside.

The government said in its push for bilingual literacy nearly 60 percent of the 290,000 pre-schoolers in Xinjiang presently received two-year bilingual education.