Viet Nam English proficiency rises in global ranking

HCM CITY (VNS) — Viet Nam slightly improved its English proficiency to rank 29th out of 70 nations and territories this year in comparison with 32nd last year in Education First's English Proficiency Index, the world's largest ranking of countries and territories by English skills.

Viet Nam is ranked a medium-level country along with Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

A score of 53.81, an increase of 2.24 from last year, meant Viet Nam was slightly above the Asian level of 53.21.

Ha Noi and HCM City, southeastern provinces and the Red River Delta were found to have better English proficiency than the others.

The report identifies global and regional English language learning trends and analyses the relationship between countries' English proficiency and their economic competitiveness.

This year's EF EPI report profiles all 70 ranked countries, using data from 910,000 adult English language learners, who were taking part in a free English test at the website www.efset.org.

The key findings of this year's EF EPI include the fact that women speak English better than men in almost every country surveyed except in the very high proficiency countries in Northern Europe.

The report explores for the first time the connection between countries' English proficiency and the level of innovation in their economies. — VNS