Grades in which English is Taught

Of course, there is a wide variation of the amount of English language instruction in the many countries where it is mandatory. This interactive chart lists all the countries where it is mandatory. The default is listing the countries alphabetically, but you can adjust this in the top left corner if you hover over the ‘country’ label. Most telling is if you organize it by the sum of the grades in which English is mandatory. Also informative is adjusting it to list the countries by the grades in which mandatory English instruction begins or ends. This data informs the pedagogical and policy debates about the age at which it is best to introduce English including recent legal developments in Korea restricting English language teaching prior to grade 3 (Faras 2018).

Because in many of these countries, in addition to the grades in which English is mandatory, in other grades it is an option for students and/or schools (or certain jurisdictions). We have included this data here as well, again in yellow. In some countries such as China and Armenia they overlap, in other words a certain number of hours are mandatory and there may also be additional optional hours. 

Below is a similar chart to the one above, but displaying only those countries in which English is not mandatory in the national public education system but available in many schools as either an option selected by students or by the schools, regions or on some other basis.

This interactive chart is similar to the one above.

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