A Comparative Study of English Education Policies in Iran, China and Singapore

It is not an extravagant claim to call english the most widespread language of the world. english is the language which is used wildly for international commerce, communication, diplomacy and tourism. the unprecedented spread of english as a lingua franca, along with globalization has had its own effects on the way english is viewed and taught in different countries (kirkgöz, 2008). kachru (1997) estimates the number of english speakers at more than two billion and mentions that the number of its speakers is constantly growing. in china, estimates put the number of english learners and users in china at about 200 to 300 million which make the country the largest community of english learners in the world. in some parts of the world such as south asia and parts of africa extensive changes in phonetic, lexical, syntactic, semantic, and discourse levels has been made through a process of acculturation and nativization. east european countries are gradually replacing russian with english. in western europe english is taught as an obligatory second language in schools and in some countries such as denmark, spain, greece, italy and netherlands it is taught as the first foreign language (kim-rivera, 2001). english has now gained the status of a lingua franca (crystal, 2003). as to the importance of the global use of english as kiany (2012) maintains it may suffice to say that the official language of about 85 percent of the international organizations is english and that about 90 percent of the scholarly papers are published in english.