Thailand's English Scores Keep Falling. The Textbooks Are Stuck in 2008.

By Andy — 2026-07-06 — English language learners books Thailand

I walked into a classroom last month. A seventeen-year-old student was staring at a photocopied worksheet. The textbook it came from? Published in 2008.

That detail lodges in my head.

Thailand just ranked 116th out of 123 countries in EF Education First's 2025 English Proficiency Index. Second to last in Asia. Now, that ranking itself stings, but here's what actually keeps me awake: we dropped 13 points in a single year. The score went from 415 down to 402. That's not a wobble. That's a slide.

The pressure on curriculum people to do something is becoming impossible to ignore. Hard to dodge. And yet the materials in classrooms haven't really budged since the mid-2000s.

I've seen it across Bangkok, Chiang Mai, even smaller provincial towns. Teachers are teaching grammar from books that predate the smartphone era. Actually, that's not quite right—they do use smartphones now, but they're using them to photograph worksheets from 2008. The contradiction doesn't even register anymore.

What frustrates me more than the ranking is the gap between what students need and what they're getting. Speaking English now means something completely different than it did when those textbooks were written. The internet has scrambled everything. Global workplaces expect conversation, fluency, the ability to think on your feet. What we're offering them instead is more or less conjugation tables and passages about "John's family holiday."

The system moves like a slow-motion accident.

Thailand's not unique in this struggle, as far as I can tell. Other countries in Southeast Asia face similar pressures. But they've at least updated their core materials once in the last decade. Thailand somehow decided that 2008 was the peak. That nothing needed changing since then. That teenagers today would learn English the same way teenagers learned it when the iPhone was released and nobody could imagine what would come next.

The question nobody wants to ask is whether we're even trying to fix it anymore, or if this has just become the new normal.