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With a growing number of tourists coming to Peru that don’t speak Spanish and more international businesses operating in and with Peru, one would assume that the country increases the efforts to improve the skills of its citizens in English, the global language. Unfortunately, quite the opposite seems to be the case. In the recently published English Proficiency Index (EPI) 2016 conducted by Education First (EF) Peru internationally ranked only 45 out of 72 countries, 10 ranking points less than last year.
And things are no better when looking only at Latin America. With 49.83 points, which represents a low proficiency, Peru placed only 8th. Interesting however that Peruvian women could score 53.34 points, according to the study a moderate proficiency, while men reached only 47.29 points, a very low proficiency.
Reasons for the poor rating amongst Peruvians include few hours of English tuition, poor teacher training, low exposure to the language and infrequent use of available English media.
The Education First (EF) English Proficiency Index (EPI) is a report aiming at evaluating countries by English language skills amongst adults. The data is collected from an English online test, that everyone with access to the internet can take, making the EPI more of a non-representative-survey. Nevertheless, as there are rarely any other current studies comparing English proficiency in different countries around the globe, the English Proficiency Index is a good indicator. Nearly one million people around the world participated in this 6th edition of the EPI, among them 9000 Peruvians.
