This article originally appeared on our sister website, Urban Family Shanghai.
By Yuzhou Hu
According to a recent report, released by international education company EF Education First, Shanghai has surpassed all other Chinese regions in English proficiency, reports Shine.
The results came from an annual test held by EF. Since 2011, the institution invites people from non-native English-speaking countries and regions to assess their proficiency in the language. This year, approximately 1.3 million people from 88 counties and regions participated in the test.
As the results revealed, Shanghai outranked other regions of China for the fifth consecutive time this year with a score of 57.91. This also enables Shanghai to become the first and only city in China to be placed in the band of high proficiency.
"The middle-class population of Shanghai has been increasing over the years," Melissa Lam, chief representative of EF, explains to Shine. "Therefore, more families plan to send their kids abroad to study and thus, more money was spent on English training."
China, on the other hand, met a little setback this year with a decline in overall ranking from 36th to 47th place. The score of China reached 51.94 this year, which fell to the category of low proficiency.
"The regression of China's performance this year may be a result of the fact that more less-developed regions in China took the test this year," says Lam. She also pointed out that China was above the world average proficiency level relating to industries including public service, healthcare, mining and automobile.
Worldwide, Sweden, the Netherlands and Singapore secured their spots as the top three performing countries. At the same time, the statistics showed that females have a better grasp of the English language than males. This positive result is attributed to females possessing a greater desire to learn and their willingness to make mistakes and learn from them.
To see where other countries rank, here are the results of this year's test.
Image via Sohu
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This article was originally published by our sister magazine Urban Family Shanghai. For more articles like this, visit the Urban Family website, or follow the Urban Family WeChat account (ID: urbanfamilyshanghai).
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