Global English: By the Numbers
A recent “English Proficiency Index" from EF Education First, focusing on a cross-national comparison of English language capability, is as interesting to me for its survey of statistical studies from the past few years and its thoughtful discussion of changes in how English is learned and used worldwide as for its own original research. (That research, based on over two million adults completing four different, free online tests each covering grammar, vocabulary, reading, and listening skills, found that Norway had the highest average proficiency of the forty-four countries tested, with other Northern European nations close behind, and Turkey and Kazakhstan at the bottom.)
Here are a few statistics from the study, which includes an extensive list of sources at the end of its surprisingly compact twenty-one pages:
- The private English instruction sector alone has become a $50 billion industry
- Within the next ten years, study of English is expected to reach a level where 2 billion people are studying the language—at any given time.
- A 2007 survey of ten thousand non-native English speaking employees at international companies found that 49 percent of workers used English every day, with only 9 percent not using the language at all.
- English has also become important in allowing collaboration in scientific research. Looking at three countries publishing large numbers of research papers—the United Kingdom; Germany (where there are a high number of proficient English language speakers), and China (where a relatively low percentage are proficient in the language)—a 2009 study found that only 15 percent of studies originating in China included any collaborators from outside the country while 48 percent of studies originating in Germany and 45 percent of those originating in the United Kingdom included at least one international contributor.
- Human resource and recruiting professionals worldwide report that candidates with English language skills achieve salaries that are 30 to 50 percent higher on average than comparable candidates without English skills.
In short: “[English proficiency] is certainly no longer a marker of the elite. Instead, it is increasingly a basic skill needed for the entire workforce, in the same way that literacy was transformed in the last two centuries from an elite privilege to a basic requirement for informed citizenship."
English has become essential as a lingua franca in today’s global world, but learning it is challenging—and a more long-term progression than many students realize:
"General consensus is that even in full-immersion settings, children need four to seven years to be as competent in academic English as their native-speaking peers, and three to five years to be as fluent orally. In the partial-immersion environment in which most students learn English, a far longer time frame is required."
While it is a myth that one needs to start language study at an early age to achieve mastery, adult learners are typically slower than children and often become discouraged by their own unrealistic expectations regarding the speed with which they can pick up the language.
In my next posting, I will summarize some sensible ways that the EF paper suggests to address the need for attaining a quick grasp of English skills while acknowledging the long-term nature of language learning.
—Lia Nigro, TOEIC USA Team
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Comments
Re-By the Numbers
Re: classroom observation research
Thanks, Khalil. My thought is that tests can be helpful in giving milestones so students can see they are making progress, even if it is not as fast as they want. (I'm going to talk about this a little in my next post on the EF study.) Also teachers can pick up on weaknesses that they can then focus on in instruction. But certainly tests can be misused and/or can be discouraging. What types of misuses were you thinking of? We don't do research ourselves--I simply provided a summary of some that others had conducted in my post--but I would definitely like to know about EL learning research based on classroom observation. Are other readers aware of interesting studies with this focus?
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