The mute leading the mute

AGUSTÍN has spent 29 years teaching English in Mexico City. It has often been a thankless task; many pupils yawn their way through class. But their lack of interest may be compounded by his lack of English. Ask him where his next lesson is, and he replies, “nine o’clock”.

He is not unusual in Mexico, despite its proximity to America. A recent survey by Mexicanos Primero, an education NGO, found that four-fifths of secondary-school graduates had “absolutely no knowledge” of English, despite having spent at least 360 hours learning it in secondary school. English teachers were not much better: one in seven had no English whatsoever.


Comparable global data are scarce, but experts say the situation is similar in much of the non-Anglophone world. Common problems include bad teachers hired via written tests rather than oral ones, and an outmoded approach that sees English as a foreign language to be taught about, rather than a lingua franca to be taught in. Teachers’ lack of fluency means too little English conversation in the classroom, says John Knagg of the British Council, so pupils do not get used to using the language. It is as if they were being taught to swim without ever getting into the water.

China has made English compulsory in school from a young age, but teachers are overstretched and mostly underqualified, says Jing Zhao, a visiting researcher at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Just over 1m English-language staff teach over 200m Chinese pupils, a heroic, if mind-boggling, teacher-pupil ratio. In Guangdong, an affluent province that Ms Jing has studied, just 257 of 53,500 English-language teachers had master’s degrees. Many speak a scripted English in class and prefer to focus on the pen-and-ink grammatical work on which their pupils are examined. “They’ve been teaching for the tests all their career,” she says.

The problem is compounded by education systems that are out of touch with parents’ demands for more English instruction. “There’s a huge and increasing demand for English, but the supply of teachers and ability to teach English have not kept up,” says Mr Knagg. In Japan, for instance, the government has said it will bolster the mandatory English requirement for children in primary school—but only from 2020 when the country hosts the Olympic games.

In Latin America “there is a huge gap between what the system provides and what the students actually need,” says Rosangela Bando of the Inter-American Development Bank. The gap widens the farther from cities one goes, she notes. Better-off city-dwelling children are more likely to have private language lessons, internet access or the chance to travel abroad.