A professor from Eötvös Loránd University gives a lesson to English teachers in Yuhuan, Taizhou on July 8. [Photo/taizhou.com.cn]

An English teacher training program offered by two professors from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary was opened in Yuhuan, a county-level city of Taizhou on July 8.

The program comes after the Yuhuan education authorities reached a cooperative agreement with the University's Belt and Road research center earlier last month.

The research center, established in October, 2016, is the first overseas institution in the world to study the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative.

According to the agreement, the center will regularly dispatch teaching experts to Yuhuan offering training classes for English teachers from local middle schools.

The five-day training program will see two foreign experts from the institution give lessons concerning English teaching methods, vocabulary and culture.

More than 30 English teachers from Yuhuan's middle schools took active part in the training class on the first day.

"Teachers from the East focus more on knowledge teaching while their counterparts in the West emphasize critical thinking. We are trying to combine both," said a professor from Eötvös Loránd University.

Zhang Rongjuan, an English teacher at Yuhuan Experimental Middle School, said that this was the first time for the city to invite a foreign professor to give training classes in over 20 years, adding that teaching completely in English is a good learning opportunity for English teachers.

According to Ye Qiuyue, deputy head of the BRI research center at Eötvös Loránd University, the center is exploring ways that China and Hungary can cooperate in education and culture so as to bring in more high-quality foreign teachers under the umbrella of BRI.