Abstract This paper investigated the status of chemistry bilingual teaching in ethnic high school of Tibet Autonomous Prefecture of Gannan in Gansu province. It showed that:(1) chemistry teachers' bilingual teaching ability needed improvement; (2) students' learning strategies and methods restricted the promotion of their chemistry learning ability; (3) Tibetan chemistry textbooks were difficult, far from students' living environment, which increased the learning difficulty of students; (4) Tibetan chemistry experiment conditions and teachers' experiment teaching skills affected the effective development of experiment teaching. Therefore, this study put forward some countermeasures to improve the development of chemistry bilingual education, in order to enhance Tibetan students' scientific literacy.