Thailand's English Problem Isn't New. It Just Got Worse.

By Andy — 2026-07-07 — English language learners books Thailand

I was in a Pattaya café last month. A group of university students had menu photos up on their phones because the printed English defeated them.

That scene keeps coming back to me after looking at the 2025 EF English Proficiency Index, which basically confirmed what anyone working in English materials here already knows: Thailand scored 402 out of a possible 800-plus, ranking 116th out of 123 countries surveyed. Second worst in Asia. The world average is 502. That's not a small gap.

What makes this worth paying attention to isn't the absolute number. It's the direction.

Thailand dropped 13 points in one year alone. But underneath that one-year cliff, there's something more stubborn: English proficiency among Thai learners aged 18 to 20 has been falling for seven years straight. These are the people entering universities and job markets. Each year, they're slightly less equipped than the ones before them.

The oldest adults in Thailand, people in their late twenties, score around 481 on average. The youngest don't come close. Actually, that's not quite right—they do come close, but from below. The gap between an 18-year-old and a 28-year-old here has become real.

Pattaya, oddly, does better than Bangkok. Pattaya scores 474, Bangkok 467. That tells you something. It's not the schools doing the work. It's the tourists. It's the foreign businesses. English proficiency in Thailand follows money and exposure more closely than it follows the curriculum, and if that doesn't indict the system, I'm not sure what does.

What the breakdown actually says

Here's where it gets interesting for anyone making learning materials. The skill split in Thailand is deeply lopsided. Reading came in at 416, which is what you'd expect from a system built on memorizing vocabulary lists and grammar patterns. Writing landed at 363—nearly 50 points lower. Speaking, 377. You can sit through years of Thai English classes, memorize everything, pass every exam, and still be unable to write a paragraph or hold a conversation. The scores just confirmed that's exactly what's happening.

A learner who reads reasonably but can't write? That's not a beginner. That's low-intermediate territory. A2 into B1 at the CEFR scale, more or less. Graded readers make sense for that profile. Controlled writing exercises. Audio materials that actually push them to speak instead of just sit. The market is there. It's been there.

Thailand isn't alone in this, mind you. Global English proficiency stalled after 2020. The pandemic hit younger age groups harder across multiple countries. But Thailand was already sliding downward before Covid showed up. The pandemic didn't cause the problem. It accelerated one that was already in motion.

There's also a gender gap worth noting, though I won't go on about it. Women consistently outperform men here, as they do across much of Asia. But the gap is widening. That means the student you're building for isn't uniform. That matters for how you market something, and who you're actually trying to reach.

It's not hopeless. South Korea was at the bottom of regional rankings not that long ago. Targeted investment in actual speaking and communication shifted things there. Vietnam has been climbing steadily for a decade. Thailand has the same economic levers—tourism, manufacturing, a growing tech sector—all of which run on English. The workforce is increasingly competing with neighbors who test significantly better. That pressure builds.

None of this is permanent. But a 13-point drop in a single year, stacked on top of seven years of decline in the youngest cohort, isn't statistical noise. It's a pattern. For anyone developing English materials or readers for Thai students, the commercial case just made itself.

Tags: Thailand, EF EPI, EFL materials, Thailand English proficiency 2025, EF English Proficiency Index Asia, Thai youth English decline