Where is the best place to study English? Is it better to move to Britain, the US, or another English-speaking country, or can you learn just as effectively at home? Does studying in person produce better results than studying online?
Is a private one-to-one class better than a small group or a large class? What about structured lessons that teach grammar and vocabulary compared with conversation-focused classes?
In this episode, we’re going to look at the research behind these questions and try to work out what makes an English-learning environment effective. The goal of the episode is to explore what combination of place, teaching, interaction, and practice gives you the best chance of improving your English!
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Vocabulary
- immersion (n.): the experience of being surrounded by and regularly using a language
- Studying abroad can provide a valuable English immersion experience.
- interaction (n.): communication between people, especially using language
- Regular interaction with native speakers can help improve your fluency.
- curriculum (n.): the subjects and content taught in a course
- The school has a structured curriculum covering grammar, vocabulary, and speaking.
- explicit (adj.): clear and direct, rather than implied
- Explicit grammar instruction can help learners understand and correct their mistakes.
- communicative (adj.): focused on using language for real communication
- Communicative activities give students opportunities to use English in realistic situations.
- hybrid (adj.): combining two different methods, especially online and face-to-face learning
- A hybrid course can combine online lessons with regular face-to-face conversation practice.
- individualised (adj.): adapted to the needs of a particular learner
- Private lessons allow students to receive more individualised feedback from their teacher.
Best Country to Study English?
This episode was inspired by a thought I had while talking to some friends recently. I was curious about which country teaches English as a second language or English as a foreign language the best. Which country is the best place to learn English?
But it turns out there is no simple answer to this. I searched online, I searched on Google Scholar, and I haven’t really been able to find a reliable global ranking that tells us, for example, that Britain is the best place to learn English, or Australia is number two, or [00:04:00] the Philippines is number three.
Rankings such as the EF English Proficiency Index measure how well people speak English in different countries, but they do not measure the quality of English language schools or tell us where a foreign learner will improve the most.
And as far as I could find, there has not been too much academic research comparing educational outcomes for English students between countries, probably because there can be such variance in the level and quality of education within a country. Wherever you go, there’s going to be great English schools and also terrible English schools.
It probably makes more sense to ask which countries make it the easiest to create the conditions to help people learn in English.
The obvious choices are places where English is the dominant language: the United Kingdom, the United [00:05:00] States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland. Probably those countries. Maybe South Africa as well.
Studying in those countries gives you opportunities to encounter English outside of your classroom. You can hear English every day.
But there are other options and countries out there. I’ve talked about Malta before many years ago on this podcast.
Or there’s the Philippines. The Philippines has a very large English language education industry, particularly aimed at international students from East Asia. There are a lot of English schools aimed at Japanese and Korean students.
And the cost of studying in the Philippines or in Malta, for example, can be lower than studying in Britain or Australia.
The best country for you is probably the country where you can combine the best level of education you can afford, with some interaction outside of the classroom, and an affordable [00:06:00] lifestyle.
Study Abroad Advantage
There is a related question here though, which I can answer trying to use some research.
Does studying English in an English-speaking country help you learn faster? Is there actually an advantage to studying abroad?
It’s definitely a common assumption that the best way to improve your English is to leave your home country and immerse yourself in Britain or the United States or Canada or any other English-speaking country.
Researchers have studied this. They’ve actually compared students who study abroad with similar students who remain at home, and the results are quite interesting.
For example, I found a 2024 meta-analysis. I’m gonna use the word meta-analysis quite often in this episode. A meta-analysis is a research paper that looks at other research papers and sees if there’s any trends in the studies and [00:07:00] research.
The 2024 meta-analysis that I found was published in The Oxford Review of Education, and it looked at 14 different studies. These studies compared studying abroad with studying at home for language learning. And across the 14 studies, they found a medium advantage for studying abroad, particularly in the development of second language fluency.
In other words, there is evidence that going abroad to study a language can make a meaningful difference.
But that isn’t the full story.
Simply being in an English-speaking country doesn’t guarantee you’re going to be better at English. What matters is what you actually do there.
Who do you live with? Who are your friends? How much English do you use outside the classroom? How much contact do you have with local speakers?
Study abroad students who have greater interaction with local people [00:08:00] tend to benefit more. Accommodation can make a big difference there. In particular, living with a host family can give you a much greater opportunity for communication than living with other international students.
The evidence suggests that studying abroad does have an advantage for your English learning, but the advantage comes from the increased opportunities to use English, not simply from being in a foreign country. If you go abroad and you don’t interact with people or use English at all, you’re not going to improve as much.
Online vs In Person
The next question I want to think about is where the actual English lesson takes place. If you want to improve your English, is it better to sit in a classroom with a teacher and other students? Or can you get the same result through a computer screen?
There is something intuitive about in-person classes. You are physically present with a [00:09:00] teacher and surrounded by other students. Online learning can seem a bit less serious. There are distractions at home. People have technical problems. There’s probably fewer opportunities for natural interaction. You’re behind a screen.
But when researchers actually compare online versus in-person study, the answer to which one is the best is not straightforward.
One important distinction is between online learning in general and what’s called synchronous online language teaching.
Online learning is what you’re doing right now. You are listening to this podcast. That’s very different from having a live 60-minute conversation with a teacher and three other students on Zoom. When we’re interested in language learning, that distinction is important because interaction is a incredibly important [00:10:00] part of language practice. We’re interested in that synchronous, which means at the same time, online language teaching.
Research on computer-assisted language learning has generally found that technology can produce positive learning outcomes. A large meta-analysis of studies of computer-assisted English instruction by Sharifi et al. found that technology-based instruction can be effective, although the results varied depending on the technology and, more importantly, how the technology was used.
Research specifically on video conferencing by Li-Tang Yu is also quite encouraging. Their meta-analysis examining video conferencing for second language learning found positive effects, including improvements in listening and speaking. The evidence base was relatively small, so we shouldn’t overstate the conclusions of that study, but it does support the idea [00:11:00] that learning through a screen is not inferior to learning in person. It could be just as good.
There is also evidence about hybrid learning. Hybrid learning is where students combine online and face-to-face instruction.
A meta-analysis published in the Modern Language Journal in 2021 compared hybrid language instruction with traditional face-to-face instruction and found only a relatively small difference between the approaches. Basically, adding an online component doesn’t automatically make language learning worse.
One major advantage of online classes is access. If you live in a country where there are not many highly qualified English teachers, studying online lets you find teachers from anywhere in the world.
Online learning can also make individualized or personal instruction easier. Here, instruction means teaching. [00:12:00] You can also combine different kinds of instruction: perhaps a private lesson for your pronunciation and grammar, a small conversation group for your fluency, and independent study for your vocabulary and listening.
But in-person learning has advantages too. The biggest advantage is social interaction. In a physical classroom, you might chat with your friend before your class starts. You might discuss something during a break. Maybe you make friends and you continue speaking English after the lesson. And if you’re studying abroad, that interaction can continue when you leave the school.
When I was studying in Japan, I was not studying Japanese technically, I was a research student, but I did take a Japanese class and I talked exclusively in Japanese to everyone in that classroom. I would talk with another British person, but our entire friendship was conducted in [00:13:00] Japanese.
This is important because one of the weaknesses of online learning is that the lesson can be, and often is, isolated from the rest of your life. You finish your Zoom call and then immediately return to your native language.
An online student might have better teaching quality than someone at a physical language school because they can have access to the best teacher in the world, find them online, and have highly personalized lessons. But the student at the physical school might have more opportunities to use English outside of the classroom.
That’s why hybrid learning is potentially really interesting. Mixing online and in-person classes. You could have the convenience of online education and also have opportunities for face-to-face interaction. I’m not sure how that would work in practice, but it sounds like a cool idea.
Best Class Size
Let’s move on now from where you study to who you study with. [00:14:00] When you choose an English class, there are so many choices.
For example, you could go onto italki or Preply and choose a private English teacher. Or you could go to Lingoda or Peter, my recommended English teacher, Peter’s English classes, and you could join a group class.
You have options for group classes, private classes, individual classes, classes with maybe two students in, or classes with five students in, or classes with ten students in.
Which is likely to produce better results? What is better, a one-to-one class or a group class?
In a private lesson, the teacher has your complete attention. Every activity can be adapted to your level and, in theory, you can spend most of the lesson speaking. In a group, you have to share the teacher’s time with everyone else.
But language [00:15:00] learning has an interesting feature that I think people forget about:
other students are not a disadvantage. Being in a group is actually an advantage for learning a language. They can be part of the learning process.
In a one-to-one class, the teacher can control the conversation. If you make a mistake, the teacher can correct you immediately. That’s great. If you don’t understand something, the teacher can stop and explain it. That’s great.
This makes private lessons useful for individualized instruction. Private classes can also give you much more opportunity to produce language. In a one-to-one class, you’ll spend hopefully over 50% of the class speaking directly to the teacher.
However, speaking to a teacher is not the same thing as communicating with other learners. Teachers, especially trained and experienced teachers, are usually great at understanding [00:16:00] broken English. Teachers are pretty good at comprehending a variety of different accents and also interpreting your mistakes.
Normal people aren’t. I’ve heard this from people who have talked with me in the past. They can have a great conversation with me, but then they go out into the real world and they struggle. I’m not an English teacher anymore, but I do run my conversation clubs and this podcast, and I spend my entire life in a non-English-speaking country. I’m pretty good at understanding English from people who are not native speakers.
But if you went to talk to perhaps some members of my family or people I went to school with, you’d have a much more challenging time potentially because they’re not as experienced at listening to non-native English accents or dealing with the mistakes that non-native speakers make.
Teachers are. People who work in education are.
When you talk to another [00:17:00] student, it’s actually a good challenge. You have to deal with their way of speaking. Compared to a teacher, your classmate’s ability in English is going to be weaker, and you’ll need to use and develop new skills to communicate with each other.
Basically, private lessons maximize individual attention. Group lessons create more opportunities for you to interact with people.
A class with two, three, or four students can combine the advantages of both approaches, I think. The teacher can give relatively individualized feedback and students, you still have other people to communicate with.
It would be too strong to say that research has definitely established four students, for example, as the perfect class size. There isn’t really a simple answer to how big is the best class size.
In fact, research suggests class size doesn’t [00:18:00] necessarily matter. The more useful variable, according to research, is how much meaningful participation each student gets. A group of six highly engaged students who spend most of the lesson speaking to each other will probably get better language practice than a group of three students who spend most of the time listening to their teacher.
And a one-to-one lesson can also be poorly designed. If the teacher spends 40 minutes explaining grammar while the student listens, the fact there is only one student doesn’t make that lesson more communicative.
When you’re choosing a teacher on italki or on Preply, or if you want to book lessons with someone I recommend, make sure to choose an experienced teacher, someone with great reviews, because there are lots of people out there who don’t know how to structure a lesson effectively.
Curriculum vs Conversation
And actually, we’ll get to that now because when you [00:19:00] choose a teacher online, often the default type of class you’re selecting is a conversation class.
But what type of class is the best?
If you attend a language school, you’re probably going to follow a strict and structured curriculum, probably based on a textbook. I did this when I lived in Taiwan. I was at a language school in Taiwan studying Chinese for six months, and we had a textbook, and every day we would work our way through the textbook.
The structure of the lesson was basically learning a particular grammar point, studying some new vocabulary, practicing it in exercises and with our classmates, and completing more activities so that we could understand it, sometimes doing a project or something. But it was all structured around a planned curriculum.
If you were to find a teacher on something like italki, Preply, or Cambly, especially a [00:20:00] cheaper teacher, someone who charges a lower amount per hour, most of the time they are not going to provide a formal curriculum because planning and designing classes takes time and it’s expensive.
if you find a cheaper teacher online, you probably will just spend an hour talking to the teacher about interesting topics.
Which is better? Which class is better? Are free conversation classes better than curriculum-based classes?
Well, there is strong evidence that explicit instruction, directly teaching things like grammar and vocabulary and language, works well. Directly teaching works well.
A 2024 meta-analysis which covered 28 studies and 3,700 learners found a positive effect for explicit instruction in second language learning. Another study published a few years earlier by Norris [00:21:00] and Ortega found similar things.
Basically, you want your teacher to directly teach you. There is an idea out there that you can learn a language by being exposed to it and by communicating. You can learn through conversation only.
Research suggests that might not be the best approach. It still works, but direct and formal instruction, like using a clear curriculum, is definitely effective
There are reasons for this. If you’re making the same mistakes repeatedly, just having more conversations won’t guarantee that you’ll notice the problem and fix your problem, You need someone to explicitly instruct you and teach you on the grammar to make sure that you are improving.
On the other hand, knowing how English works is not the same as being able to use English. Just studying English theory, using a textbook by yourself, is not really going to help you speak [00:22:00] English.
This is why communicative and task-based approaches to learning English have become really popular.
Task-based learning tries to give students a reason to learn English. For example, you might have to plan a holiday with a limited budget, or decide who gets a job, or debate how a city should spend its money. The language becomes a tool for accomplishing something.
When I was studying Japanese in Tokyo, at graduate school, one of the classes I took was a debate class. We had a curriculum. It involved studying grammar and vocabulary, but the main purpose of the class, each class, was to have a debate. We learned the language to use it as a tool for debating.
And I took another course at the same time on public speaking, which was similar. We had a curriculum. But the main task over our course was to write a speech and present it in front of people
Research into task-based language teaching has [00:23:00] generally found positive effects on second language development. Although the size of those effects varies between studies, and there is still debate on how effective task-based learning is compared to other types of language instruction.
I think it would be good, or there is a need to mix curriculum-based education with communicative practices. This is what I do. And it’s what I recommend people who join my Patreon do, or join my conversation clubs do.
Join the conversation club to practice speaking, join the conversation club to improve your confidence. But in your own time, at home, maybe take an English class with a teacher, use a textbook, build your skills, and then practice your skills in the conversation club.
You can’t just rely on one form of study to improve all of your English ability. The structured curriculum can provide the knowledge, communication opportunities, gives you a reason to use your knowledge.
Best Place??
So where is the best place [00:24:00] to learn English?
I’ve looked at a lot of research in this episode, and ultimately the answer is…
there isn’t a best place to learn English, but there are better and worse learning environments.
If you have the opportunity to study abroad, the evidence suggests that it can provide an advantage, particularly for your fluency. But simply being abroad is not enough. You need to interact with English, you need to immerse yourself in English. You need to use English to have that improvement.
A great English-speaking environment might look something like this:
Taking an intensive course which has relatively small classes, regular opportunities to speak, individual feedback from a teacher, and plenty of English outside of the classroom. Living with English speakers and developing friendships with English speakers can make your environment even stronger.
But you [00:25:00] don’t necessarily need to get on a plane to do that.
A learner studying at home could combine high quality online or face-to-face lessons which contain some one-to-one feedback, and then use English language media, reading, writing, and maybe meetups or online chats to communicate with other English speakers. That could also be an extremely effective learning environment.
The location where you study English matters, but what you do with the location, the type of class you take, the type of curriculum you take, that matters much more.
Final Thought
The research suggests that what matters most to the success of your English learning is the learning environment. You need good instruction, meaningful communication, regular feedback, and lots of opportunities to actually use [00:26:00] English.
The best place for you to learn English is the place where you can spend the most time actively using English and learning new things in the most effective way.
If you could choose anywhere in the world to go and improve your English, where would you go, and why?
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