Teaching faculty
Another major problem regarding bilingual education is the lack of teaching faculty.
There have been some good attempts in cultivating minority teachers. Teacher-training colleges were widely set up in minority areas for training minority teachers. Furthermore, normal universities also enroll minority students, for instance, Beijing Normal University and some other normal universities attached to the Ministry of Education. Meanwhile, provinces and cities also send Han teachers to minority areas regularly to support education (Ma, 2007). However, qualified minority teachers or bilingual teachers are still in short supply.
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Bilingual teachers need to be not only responsible and conscientious but also proficient in both minority languages and Mandarin. Meanwhile, they also need to be equipped with knowledge of linguistics, ethnology and educational theory. “A good teacher must have an in-depth understanding of the material and ample experience in the classroom, backed up by an advanced degree and training that meets the norms of the profession” (Ma, 2007, p.20). Most teachers in minority regions cannot meet these requirements due to relatively low educational attainment, insufficient training and unreasonable knowledge structure. In some minority regions, not all subjects are offered due to teachers lacking the corresponding disciplinary knowledge. The quality of teaching staff in these areas needs to be improved. Furthermore, bilingual teachers in minority areas are in short supply. In some remote areas, because of the lack of bilingual teachers, local governments only set up ethnic language class or only Mandarin language class, which also impedes the development of bilingual education.
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In addition, the training for bilingual teachers in minority regions is not systematic or complete, which may also account for the low quality of the teaching team and the shortage of high quality teachers. Lastly, although Han teachers are regularly sent to minority regions to support language education, most of them will not stay for a long time and they know little about minority languages and culture.