URUMQI -- Authorities in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region plan to recruit more than 11,000 teachers from around the country to ease its teacher shortage.

A total of 4,589 teachers will be recruited for primary and middle schools, 3,635 for high schools, 3,551 for kindergartens and 78 for special education schools in 2016, according to the regional education department.

Of those, 60 percent will work in four prefectures in the southern part of Xinjiang, where a dearth of bilingual teachers pose a challenge for education. The recruits in these areas should be able to speak Chinese and a language of the local minorities.

Xinjiang has hired 72,600 teachers in the past five years, with about 62,400 of them bilingual.