France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study
&gt; EF Education First, a Swedish company based in Switzerland that manages more than 600 language schools across 50 countries.<p>Wow, I remember the English First billboards in Shanghai around 2009-2010. They showed a white guy and a Chinese woman raising their hands together, and their arms were shackled together at the wrist with a really heavy rope.<p>This must have worked for the Chinese target audience, but I found it hilarious.<p>&gt; There are some concerns, as Quartz’s Nikhil Sonnad noted about last year’s report, about how representative the data it collects and analyzes is of the general population of each country. “The proficiency scores are based on free online tests, so the people taking them are self-selected,” he wrote, “They are not a representative sample of the country’s citizens, and may instead represent a group that is particularly interested in English and has access to the internet.” Even so, Sonnad says “it is the best dataset available for measuring English ability across countries.”<p>This is a weird concern to raise -- the idea that EF&#x27;s data isn&#x27;t representative because it&#x27;s pulled from a sample of citizens extraordinarily interested in English would strongly imply that the true proficiency level in every country is much lower than reported, and to a lesser extent that the gaps between countries are probably wider than reported.<p>&gt; correlation doesn’t necessarily prove causation. Is it, as EF and others argue, that better English skills facilitate global trade and investment, which leads to growth and new jobs? Or is it that rich countries can invest more in bilingual education?<p>Surely these are both true.