Despite 150 years as a British colony and English continuing to play an important role in the territory as an official language and key subject within school curriculums, Hong Kong is seemingly lagging behind—coming 33th place in Education First’s (EF) latest English Proficiency Index.
Aside from having lower fluency than most European countries, Hong Kong also fell behind Asian rivals such as Singapore, Malaysia, India, South Korea, Vietnam, Japan, Taiwan and Indonesia.
The EF English Proficiency Index 2015 is the world’s largest ranking of countries by English skills which identifies global and regional English language learning trends and analyses the relationship between the countries’ English proficiency and their economic competitiveness. In the 2015 survey, it reported the profiles of 70 ranked countries using test data from 910,000 adult English language learners.
It is a dramatic turn of events for Hong Kong which only in 2011 ranked 12th in the world in the same proficiency index. Compared to its closest comparable rival in economic terms, Singapore—which also has a shared history of colonisation and this year sits in 12th position—showed similar spending on education, 17.5% compared to Hong Kong’s 18.2% and almost the same mean years of schooling, 10.20 years compared to Hong Kong’s 10.00.
At the top of the ranking sits Sweden, while the Middle East didn't fair quite so well and ended up at the bottom of the table.
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
