Colombia is the third country in Latin America with the worst level of English

Education First (EF) presented the “English Proficiency Index” (EPI) report, a ranking among 100 countries in different regions of the world based on their English skills, in which Colombia was ranked 77th.

The classification of the foreign language teaching and student exchange company has been divided into five categories on language proficiency: “Very high”, “High”, “Moderate”, “Low” and “Very low”, Colombia for its low score.

With only 448 points, Colombia ranked below Morocco, Indonesia and Bahrain with 453 points and above Mongolia 446, Afghanistan 445 and Angola 444 which ranked 80th on the list of 100 countries.

“The population-weighted average global English proficiency score remained stable, but the scores of 26 countries improved significantly (i.e. increased by more than two points), while only seven countries experienced a significant reduction,” noted EF’s ranking of countries that do not have English as their mother tongue.

The foreign company carried out the global classification of the level of knowledge of the English language with the data of 2.2 million participants from the five continents, of which 54% were women and whose average age was 26 years.

At the same time, Colombia ranked 17th out of 19 among Latin American countries, only above Mexico with 440 points and Ecuador, the worst ranked in the region, with 411 points.

Colombia’s performance since 2011 has been poor. In 2017, out of 80 countries, it ranked 51st; in 2018, among 88 countries it was ranked 60; and in 2019, out of 100 countries it was 68, nine places ahead of this ranking.

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In Latin America, the best latecomers were Argentina with 566 points in the “high” proficiency category and Costa Rica with 530, Chile with 523 and Paraguay with 517 points in the “moderate” proficiency category .

“Latin America is taking a 180 ° turn, twelve of the 19 countries surveyed this year in Latin America improved their English skills between 2018 and 2019, and many of them significantly. Other Latin American countries that have invested heavily in teacher training in recent years are finally seeing a real improvement “noted EF in the index.

According to EF, there have been educational reforms in Latin America over the past 20 years to teach English more broadly and in a better way due to demand, which is why it says it is too early to estimate this progress based on “just the levels. adult domain “.

However, he indicated that national tests in different countries in the region showed promising results among students and said that successful models will pave the way for the rest of the countries.

Finally, he stressed that access to English remains uneven despite laws establishing the language as a compulsory subject, with a significant gap between urban and rural areas and between public and private schools.

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