The Seoul education authorities said Monday that foreign teachers would be sent to local schools as part of the city’s efforts to better support students with multicultural backgrounds.

The Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education will dispatch 86 expat teachers who are fluent in both their mother tongue and Korean, officials said. The teachers will hail from China, Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Mongolia, Thailand and Central Asia.

The teachers are professionally qualified, having completed a yearly dual language teaching program of 900 hours at Seoul National University of Education, they added.

The dual language teachers will be in charge of teaching their mother tongue and Korean, counseling foreign parents and providing courses on multiculturalism, officials said.

As of December last year, there were more than 9,800 multicultural students in the capital, with nearly 7,000 studying at elementary schools, 1,800 at middle schools, and the rest at high schools, the education authorities said.

By Lee Hyun-jeong  \(rene@heraldcorp.com)