Browsed through the report downloaded from the following site:
http://www.ef-uk.co.uk/epi/ef-epi-ranking/?tc=LQ
I believe this achievement is something to be proud of, a good indicator of Malaysia Boleh.
EPI is the first evaluation of its kind that measures English proficiency of over 2 million working adults from 44 countries.
I applaud the effort to establish such index, and this is certainly a good guideline for policy makers & educators to assess the effectiveness of English policies in the nation.
However a few questions to ponder after flipped through the report:-
* How random the selection was? i.e. how diverse the professions/occupations of the respondents were? Were the test takers solely from “white collar” group?
* Was the sample size (no. of test takers) relative to the country population?
* What’s the description/definition for moderate/low/high English proficiency? The score for Malaysia is 55.85 (high proficiency), while Hong Kong-54.44 (moderate proficiency), that’s such a small difference of 1.41, and this carries a heavy weigh that classified them into two discrete group.
* From the report, it showed that the test was carried out online over a period of 3 years, so I wonder how valid the test was when there’s no assessor around the test takers (hmm, well maybe there was, but didn’t mentioned in the report :) )?
As stated in this report, the EPI is not an indicator of a nation academic & economic performance. Therefore bridging the gap of English proficiency between pupils/students from rural and urban areas & improving our English teaching standard (especially in Science & Math) are not a issue we should take lightly despite of the high English proficiency among working adults.
