BEIJING, July 12 -- Twenty-nine Indonesian women finished a year-long course in Guangzhou yesterday in a pilot programme teaching overseas pre-school teachers in Chinese.

    Aged between 18 and 37 and including one from an aboriginal Indonesian family, the teachers will return to Indonesia to work in kindergartens for Chinese children living there.

    The course, at the Guangzhou Pre-school Normal School in Guangdong Province, also includes children's psychology, teaching skills, music, art, sports and computer science, as well as oral and written Chinese.

    When they first came, all 29 apart from three had considerable difficulties in learning Chinese, said school principal Liao Peizhi.

    But by the end, 20 of them passed a test normally mandatory only for local students after three years' study. Two scored more than 90, Liao said.

    Josephine Chan, 21, a primary school teacher in Indonesia, said she could speak and write only a little Chinese before she joined the course.

    Although born to a family of Chinese origin, she knew little about the language before she came.

    She said along with her language progress, the school had offered dancing and music lessons. Chan plans to take a lot of Chinese books and discs back with her to continue her study and to share them with her future students.

    "I am happy my daughter has learned this - and learning it here in China is certainly the best linguistic environment," said Christime Halim, whose daughter was on the course.

    Arranged by the overseas Chinese affairs offices of Guangdong and Guangzhou, and the Guangzhou Municipal Bureau of Education, the programme has been created when Chinese study is increasingly popular in Indonesia but Chinese language teachers are largely insufficient.

    The programme will be expanded to allow 60 Indonesian students and will be held in Guangzhou and Jiangmen, another Guangdong city, in the coming school year. It will be further enlarged to accommodate about 200 students in 2006, which, however, is still far from enough to meet the demand, said Lu Weixiong, director of the Guangdong Provincial Overseas Chinese Affairs Office.

    (Source: China Daily)