The Education Department of Aba Tibetan-Qiang Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan Province has compiled 56 Tibetan-Chinese bilingual reading materials, planning to put 560,000 books into local kindergartens, primary and middle schools within the next five years, promoting the protection and heritage of ethnic minority culture.

Tibet and Tibetan-inhabited areas in other four provinces including Sichuan, Gansu, Qinghai, and Yunnan have launched bilingual schools, in which Tibetan students can systematically study math, physics, chemistry, geography, and other subjects in Tibetan language.

However, Tibetan-Chinese bilingual reading materials, especially those in kindergartens, are still lacking.

Ma Qingchun is a language teacher at the Aba County Nationality Boarding Primary School in Aba Prefecture. She said that these bilingual books are a great help to students. “Whether it’s in Tibetan or Chinese, students’ spoken and written skills all progress very quickly.”

She said, “The Tibetan of children from rural families is a little better, but children who grow up in urban areas have more contact with Chinese. With bilingual textbooks, children can use the language they are good at to learn another language.”

In 2015, the Aba Prefecture Education Department donated 2,000 cases with a total of 112,000 bilingual books to local kindergartens and primary and middle schools. The content of these books includes habits, intellectual development, ethnic story picture books, and novels by local authors.

Kampu, a girl in the fifth grade at Aba County Nationality Boarding Primary School, said that she loves “A Hundred Thousand Whys”, “Three Wanderers” picture book and the cartoon book “Complete Works of Father and Son” from Germany. There are many of these illustrated books, and it is convenient to place the Tibetan and Chinese side-by-side for comparison.

Several bilingual books promote cultural characteristics of the local area. “My Grassland is My Home” is written for the Tibetans in Aba Prefecture who speak the Amdo dialect, and was written for students in fourth grade and above. The content involves traditional festivals, craft arts, rituals, and the Gesar epic.

“The characters, homes, and lives in the picture books are the same as what they see, so it’s very easy for the children to understand,” said Tseji, a kindergarten teacher in Tieqiong Village, Aba County.

Teachers in Aba County kindergartens and primary and middle schools hope to increase the number and variety of bilingual books in their schools. “Most of the students in our class have finished reading 32 of the bilingual books. If we can get science fiction, animal, popular science, and detective stories, too, then it will be even better,” Yongmei-Tso, a language teacher at Aba County Primary School, said.