In a recent study a lecturer in the faculty of education at Silpakorn University, collected data from five countries - China, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and Thailand, including documents from the education ministry academic journals newspapers and interviews with students and teachers in each country. The study is aimed at finding projects for teaching English that have worked.
The researcher said Thailand should learn from China's English Corners programme conducted in schools and also from its English proficiency exit tests that are needed to get a college degree; Singapore's extensive reading programme to help primary school learners and their parents gain the foundations of English reading, and work in Vietnam to raise the standards of teaching and professionalism among English teachers.
Malaysia's 10-year policy on teaching math and science with English will be ended because although it helped students in English subjects, the students suffered in math and science, so Thailand should not pursue such a programme. Some policies in Thailand are not pursued in a consistent or serious manner such as the policy of speaking English in school every Monday which was suddenly stopped following a change in education minister.
The 2013 English proficiency index of Education First, has three countries ranked first for their proficiency in English: Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands. In Asia, the ranking was Malaysia, Singapore, India, Hong Kong, South Korea, Indonesia, Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan and China with Thailand coming last.