The World Spends Billions Teaching English. The Results Are Embarrassing.
The numbers are staggering. The failure rate is worse. And the pattern behind the failure tells us everything about what works and what doesn’t.
There’s a number that should stop every English teacher, every curriculum designer, and every language learning app developer in their tracks.
1.75 billion people are currently learning or using English worldwide, according to the British Council. It is, by a wide margin, the most studied language on earth. More resources, more courses, more apps, more textbooks, more teachers, and more money are poured into English education than into any other language learning effort in human history.
And global English proficiency is declining.
Not improving. Declining. For the fourth consecutive year, according to the EF English Proficiency Index, the world is getting worse at English despite spending more time and money trying to learn it. Sixty percent of countries scored lower in 2024 than the year before.
Something is profoundly broken. And the data tells us exactly what it is.
The Global Report Card
The EF English Proficiency Index tests over two million adults across 116 countries each year. It’s the largest international survey of English skills by country. The results are sorted into five bands: Very High, High, Moderate, Low, and Very Low.
In 2024, only 31 countries achieved a score of High or Very High. That’s roughly one in four. The remaining three-quarters of the world’s English learners, representing billions of people and decades of classroom instruction, fell into Moderate, Low, or Very Low.
Some of the specific country results are hard to read without wincing.
Japan ranked 92nd out of 116 countries. Very Low proficiency. This in a country where English is a compulsory subject for six years of middle and high school. Six years of mandatory English classes, and Japan’s proficiency is declining, falling further each year since the index began. Japanese students aged 18 to 25 actually performed worse than older adults, suggesting the education system is getting less effective, not more.
Brazil ranked in the Low proficiency band. Colombia, Low. Turkey, Low. China, Low. Mexico, Very Low. Thailand, Very Low. Saudi Arabia, Very Low. Each of these countries has an enormous English learning industry. Millions of students. Billions of dollars in educational spending. And proficiency that is, by any standard, disappointing relative to the investment.
Meanwhile, the Netherlands has held the number one spot for six consecutive years. Croatia jumped to second. Austria third. The Scandinavian countries cluster near the top. These countries consistently produce adults who speak English with a fluency that puts the rest of the world to shame.
The question is obvious: what are the top countries doing differently?
The Pattern Nobody Wants to Admit
The answer is hiding in plain sight, and it has almost nothing to do with the quality of classroom instruction.
The Netherlands doesn’t dub foreign television. Dutch people grow up watching English-language films and TV shows with Dutch subtitles. They hear English constantly, from childhood, through entertainment they actually enjoy. The same is true across Scandinavia. Swedish children watch English cartoons. Norwegian teenagers consume English YouTube. Danish young adults follow English-language podcasts and social media.
These populations are immersed in English input from an early age. Not through classroom instruction. Through their media environment. Through the sheer volume of real, natural, compelling English flowing through their eyes and ears every day, as a byproduct of living in a country that subtitles rather than dubs.
Japan dubs. Brazil dubs. Thailand dubs. Spain dubs. Mexico dubs. Every major country in the Low and Very Low proficiency bands dubs foreign content into the local language, cutting off the population from the English input that the high-performing countries receive as a matter of daily life.
The correlation between subtitling culture and English proficiency is so strong that researchers have studied it directly. A study on European language learning found that countries with a subtitling tradition consistently outperform dubbing countries on English proficiency measures.
The classroom hours are roughly similar across these countries. Japan mandates six years of English. The Netherlands requires English from primary school. The investment in formal instruction is comparable. The proficiency outcomes are vastly different. And the variable that separates them is not the classroom. It’s the input.
Six Years of Classes, Zero Fluency
Japan’s situation deserves a closer look because it illustrates the failure so starkly.
A Japanese student begins compulsory English education in middle school and continues through high school. Six years. Hundreds of hours of classroom time. Grammar-focused instruction. Written exams that test knowledge of rules and vocabulary. A high school entrance exam that includes a significant English component.
The result? Japan ranks in the Very Low proficiency band and is getting worse each year. Japanese adults, despite six years of English instruction, overwhelmingly cannot hold a conversation in English.
An article on Medium titled “The Failure of English Education in Japan: 6 Years of Wasted Lessons” noted that despite this massive investment, most Japanese struggle to communicate effectively in English. The author, a homestay operator, observed that visitors from non-English-speaking countries who had received far fewer years of formal instruction often spoke English more fluently than his Japanese neighbours who had studied it for six years.
Six years of grammar-focused instruction, producing adults who cannot communicate. Meanwhile, a Dutch teenager who never took an English grammar class in their life but grew up watching English YouTube speaks with casual fluency.
The classroom taught grammar. The YouTube taught English.
The Billion-Dollar Industry That Isn’t Working
The global English learning market is worth billions. Apps, courses, tutoring services, language schools, certification programmes, textbooks, all of it generating revenue while global proficiency declines.
This isn’t a conspiracy. Most of the people working in the industry genuinely want their students to succeed. The teachers care. The app developers are trying. The schools mean well.
The problem is systemic. The industry is built around a model, grammar-focused instruction, explicit vocabulary teaching, structured progression through textbook units, that the evidence increasingly shows doesn’t produce fluency. The model produces test scores. It produces certifiable, measurable, grade-able knowledge about English. What it doesn’t reliably produce is the ability to understand and speak English in the real world.
And because the industry measures success through test scores rather than through real-world communication ability, the failure is invisible within the system. A student who scores 80% on a grammar exam is a success by the system’s metrics. That the same student can’t order lunch in English doesn’t appear in any report.
What the Successful Countries Tell Us
The countries at the top of the proficiency rankings are not succeeding because they have better textbooks or better teachers or better curricula. They’re succeeding because their populations are exposed to massive amounts of real English through daily life.
The Dutch child who watches English cartoons with subtitles is receiving comprehensible input. The Swedish teenager who follows English-language gaming channels is receiving comprehensible input. The Norwegian adult who listens to English podcasts during their commute is receiving comprehensible input.
This is the input hypothesis in action at a national scale. The countries that provide the most English input through their media environment produce the most English proficiency. The countries that rely primarily on classroom instruction produce the least. The correlation is consistent, measurable, and has held for every year the index has been published.
What This Means for You
You can’t change your country’s dubbing policy. You can’t restructure your national English curriculum. You can’t make your government invest in subtitling rather than dubbing.
But you can do what the Dutch do. You can build your own English media environment, regardless of where you live.
Read English content that interests you on LingQ. Watch English shows with subtitles on Lingopie. Listen to English podcasts during your commute. Follow English-language creators on YouTube and social media. Fill your daily environment with real English the way the Dutch and the Scandinavians fill theirs, through entertainment, through content you enjoy, through the natural flow of compelling input rather than through grammar exercises.
You are, in effect, creating your own personal Netherlands. A media environment where English flows through your day as naturally as it flows through the day of someone in Amsterdam or Stockholm. Not because you live there. Because you chose to build it.
The six-year Japanese classroom couldn’t produce fluency. The Dutch media environment does. The difference is input. And input is something you control.
The System Failed. You Don’t Have To.
If you’ve spent years in English classes and you’re not fluent, you are not the exception. You are the statistical norm. The majority of the 1.75 billion people learning English will not reach fluency through the methods they’re currently using. The data is unambiguous about this.
The system failed those 1.75 billion people. It failed them with grammar-focused instruction that produces knowledge about English rather than the ability to use English. It failed them with dubbing policies that cut them off from the input their brains needed. It failed them by measuring success through test scores that don’t reflect real-world communication.
But you don’t have to stay in that statistic. The evidence from the top-performing countries shows exactly what works: massive, daily, enjoyable exposure to real English through media, reading, and listening. The same thing this blog has been saying in every post. Not because it’s a philosophy. Because the data from 116 countries and 2.1 million test takers confirms it.
Read. Listen. Watch. Speak. Build your own immersion. The system won’t do it for you. The countries that succeed are the ones where immersion happens whether the system provides it or not.
Your immersion starts with a pair of headphones and something worth listening to.
For building your own personal immersion through reading and listening to English content you love, LingQ is the tool I recommend above all others.
For creating the subtitling environment that makes top-performing countries top-performing, through real TV shows and films with interactive subtitles, Lingopie turns your screen time into genuine acquisition.
For training your mouth through structured sentence repetition, Glossika builds speaking alongside comprehension. Available in both British and American English.
If you want compelling, story-driven English listening at just the right level, Olly Richards’ Conversations course is well worth exploring.
If you’re ready to activate your input through real conversation, iTalki is where I’d start. And if you’d like to work with me, book a trial lesson here.
✍🏼 Richard
Thanks for reading. I’m Richard, an English conversation partner in New Zealand. I help learners do what the top-performing countries do naturally: build fluency through input, real conversation, and daily contact with English they actually enjoy.
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