Understanding of English Improves Worldwide
The world’s understanding of English appears to be getting better. The private education company EF recently relead a report called English Proficiency Index. The report ranks English language proficiency in 63 countries into five categories or class. They are: “very high proficiency, high, moderate, low and very low.”
Minh Tran is EF’s Director of Rearch and Academic Partnerships.
The English Proficiency Index says Denmark is the top country for English as a foreign language. Poland and Austria have joined Denmark and other northern European countries with the “very high proficiency” ranking. Malaysia and Singapore have the best ranking in Asia with “high proficiency” in English.
South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong have invested a lot of time and money in English education. But the countries have not improved since the last study came out in 2007.
Minh Tran has this to say: “I think they are not improving becau they have not made any significant reform to the way they teach English in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong. They still rely quite heavily on rote memory. And there’s a strong focus on grammar and vocabulary acquisition, but not so much on the actual communicative skills.”
For its report, EF ud online test results from 750,000 adults in 63 countries. The test takers were adults who cho to take the company’s online test. They were not a random sample of the total population. For that reason, the results might be biad toward people who are interested in English and u the Internet.
Improvements have also been noted on average scores for the TOEFL, the Test of English as a Foreign Language, and IELTS, the International English Language Testing System.
The British Council estimates that 1.75 billion people speak English today. The group expects that number to grow to two billion by 2020 – about one-fourth of the world’s population.
