500 bilingual Xinjiang teachers to undergo training

A total of 500 ethnic minority teachers from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region will be dispatched to universities in inland China for a one-year training program that is designed to train more bilingual teachers and boost educational quality in the region, according to regional educational authorities. In addition, 225 of the region's Chinese teachers, along with 60 elementary and secondary school headmasters, have been sent to universities in the municipalities of Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin, as well as Jiangsu Province, for the purpose of undergoing training or taking up temporary posts in elementary and secondary schools, according to the region's education department. The Chinese government and the Xinjiang regional government have allocated 76 million yuan (11.9 million U.S. dollars) to send more than 6,000 teachers to inland universities between 2003 and 2006. So far, 1,450 teachers and 120 headmasters from elementary and secondary schools have been trained at inland cities since 2009.