Portugal is the seventh country in the world with the best English proficiency – O Jornal Económico
Portugal is the seventh country in the world with the best English proficiency, according to the classification “EF English Proficiency Index” for 2021, which analyzed data on 2.2 million non-native English speakers in 112 countries and regions around the globe. The country, level level did not change compared to 2020, comes behind Belgium (6th position), Norway (5th), Singapore (4th), Denmark (3rd), Austria (2nd) and the Netherlands, which return to lead the table this year.
After, in 2019, Portugal entered the group of countries with “high proficiency” in English for the first time, the 625 points collected by Portugal ended up being the best record ever in the classification prepared by the international education company.
In terms of cities, Porto is, for the third consecutive year, the Portuguese city where the best English is spoken, followed by Coimbra (2nd) and Lisbon (3rd), according to the index based on the results of the EF SET test ( EF English standard).
There are even gender and age differences. In Portugal, men managed to obtain a better classification than women, despite females having a “very high” level of English (621 points) – higher than the average of men worldwide (508 points). And Portuguese young people between 21 and 25 years old continue to be the ones with the best marks in this evaluation.
In southern Europe, Portugal continues to be one of the countries where English is best spoken, leaving behind nations such as Greece (19th place), France (30th), Spain (33rd) and Italy (35th). The company also realized that, for the first time, Scandinavia ceased to dominate as the top positions in this global study. On the other hand, at the bottom of the table are the Democratic Republic of Congo (110th place), South Sudan (111th) and Yemen (112th).
“Despite the decline in travel, English continues to facilitate communication and courtesy, in addition to enabling new ways of working. This year’s EF EPI is more distributed than ever, providing valuable information for governments to assess their language learning policies and highlighting strategic areas for improvement,” says Kate Bell, author of the index.
As for the professions, the levels are: consulting (moderate), information technology (moderate), engineering (moderate), consumer goods (moderate), food (low), logistics (low), hospitality (low), aviation (low ) ), retail (low), construction (low), pharmaceutical (low), telecommunications (low), automobile (low), energy (low), banking and finance (low), electronics (low), chemistry (low) , industry (very low), insurance (very low), and education (very low).
