The Philippine Department of Education has recently signed agreements with the Confucius Institute Headquarters, specifying that they will work together to train a batch of professional Mandarin teachers to promote Mandarin teaching and learning in the Philippines.

According to the agreements, the Philippine Department of Education will select 300 local Mandarin teachers from middle schools and send them to the Angeles University Foundation in the Philippines to take postgraduate courses in Mandarin.

Altogether, they will study for two years, with two semesters in the Fujian Normal University in southeast China's Fujian province and the other four at the Angeles University Foundation. After that, they will continue to teach Mandarin in their former schools.

With the development of Philippines-China relations, more young people in the Philippines have realized that it is important to learn Mandarin, said Leonor Magtolis Briones, Secretary of the Department of Education.

Tian Shanting, the cultural counselor of the Chinese Embassy to the Philippines, pointed out that the training program will promote the development of Mandarin teaching and learning in public middle schools and provide more opportunities for locals to learn Chinese language and culture.

Since 2011, Mandarin has been included as an elective language course in public middle schools in the Philippines. At present, about 11,000 students from 93 public middle schools across the country are learning Mandarin.