📊 Korean English by the numbers
Rankings get quoted when people describe the state of Korean English. But rankings change with whoever computes them. So I went to the source — ETS, which runs the TOEFL, publishes country average scores as they are, every year.
ETS, “Test and Score Data Summary 2019.” Left is Korea, right is the world average.
What to watch in this table is not the total but the shape. At a total of 83 — exactly the world average — reading is above average and speaking below. The strong and the weak are split. It is hard to call it chance: what we have trained for over a decade is precisely the reading side.
Total muscle is average, but the arms are thick and the legs thin. It is not that no exercise was done — one event was done, for a long time.
What they can say is only that the test-taker group’s average is this. TOEFL takers are people preparing to study or work abroad, not a sample of the whole population, and the makeup of takers differs by country. So this table cannot conclude that “Koreans are bad at speaking.” What does remain, independent of the sampling problem, is that within the same people, reading and speaking diverged. That one thing is what we take from this piece.
We have gone far enough in the direction of more reading. The handle left is order — set the sound first and put the letters behind it ([[listening-first-order]]). That spending more time is closed is in [[three-thousand-hours]]; why we listen to Korean first is in [[hangul-sokcheong-what]].
Source
ETS, “TOEFL iBT Test and Score Data Summary 2019” (test data Jan–Dec 2019) — Korea Table 16 (22·21·20·20, total 83), World Table 2 (21.2·20.9·20.6·20.5, total 83). Related: [[why-english-doesnt-click]], [[korea-english-spending]]. — Not carried over: the source column’s “speaking rank 121st/132nd,” “worse than Somalia and Uganda,” and “Finland speaking 3rd, 70% of the nation,” whose ranking method and primary sources could not be confirmed, replaced here with the averages ETS publishes directly.
Read the original →※ This article summarizes and restructures the key points of the source above.