From an investigation about the factors influencing the trilingual education in Chinese ethnic minority regions, the author find out that the minority students are incompetent in English learning. Inappropriate teaching strategies, learning materials as well as language policy hinder the development of teaching and learning progress in those areas, which still causes the minority students' lack of learning motivation. In trilingual education, we believe that teaching should be learner-centered and teachers, students, tasks and context of situation are greatly emphasized. This paper conducts a research on English teaching in trilingual education based on the application of motivation, communicative competence and autonomous learning theories in Chinese minority regions, looking forward to provide some approaches on improving the minority students' English learning competence.