Main Topic: The Relationship Between English Language Proficiency and the National Economic Performance: Focusing on non-English-Speaking OECD Countries.
This study aims at investigating how English proficiency affects economic development of a count ...
Main Topic: The Relationship Between English Language Proficiency and the National Economic Performance: Focusing on non-English-Speaking OECD Countries.
This study aims at investigating how English proficiency affects economic development of a country by analyzing the relationships among English proficiency, economic activities (amount of trade, R&D investment, etc), and the rate of economic growth, focusing on twenty-one non-English-speaking OECD countries. Ordinary Least Square (OLS) and Seemingly Unrelated Regression Estimation (SURE) were used for the data analysis in the study. The findings reveals that there existed little statistical significance to support the fact that English proficiency was directly related to the economic development in a positive way in many countries except Mexico, the Czech Republic, Finland, and Poland. However, English proficiency indirectly influenced the economic development in the way of increasing the amount of trade. These results can lead to the conclusion that English proficiency is not a sufficient element but a necessary one. Furthermore, it is expected that English proficiency can positively affect the economic development when it plays a part as sufficient complementary goods which make up for physical capital, technology accumulation, political stability, and worthy government.
Subtopic(1):Linguistic and Educational Factors Affecting TOEFL Scores: Focusing on Three OECD Countries in EFL contexts.
This study aims at investigating the linguistic and educational factors affecting TOEFL scores, focusing on three OECD countries, Korea, Japan, and Finland. The data comprise document analysis on curriculums, websites, and literature. The findings reveal that the number of Korean test-takers and their TOEFL scores gradually increased year by year. Finnish test-takers consistently gained greatly high scores, and Japanese examinees showed the lowest scores. The languages Korean, Japanese, and Finnish are all far distant from English and receive little support on historical grounds from the Indo-European family tree. In Finland, however, Swedish which belongs to Indo-European languages is still used as an official language with Finnish. Korea and Finland adopt English education from Year 3 in primary school, whereas English is not an official subject in primary school at present in Japan. Finnish students are taught a foreign language in addition to English from primary school. These seem to support the result of the high TOEFL scores of Finnish test-takers. This study concludes that social context which includes linguistic and educational environments are the main factors which affect TOEFL scores.
Subtopic(2):The Relationship Between English Language Proficiency and the National Economic Performance: Focusing on non-English-Speaking OECD Countries.
This study aims at investigating how English proficiency affects economic development of a country by analyzing the relationships among English proficiency, economic activities (amount of trade, R&D investment, etc), and the rate of economic growth, focusing on twenty-one non-English-speaking OECD countries. Ordinary Least Square (OLS) and Seemingly Unrelated Regression Estimation (SURE) were used for the data analysis in the study. The findings reveals that there existed little statistical significance to support the fact that English proficiency was directly related to the economic development in a positive way in many countries except Mexico, the Czech Republic, Finland, and Poland. However, English proficiency indirectly influenced the economic development in the way of increasing the amount of trade. These results can lead to the conclusion that English proficiency is not a sufficient element but a necessary one. Furthermore, it is expected that English proficiency can positively affect the economic development when it plays a part as sufficient complementary goods which make up for physical capital, technology accumulation.