A Comparative Study of English Education at Iranian and Finnish Schools

As a result of an increase in interest and definitely urgent need in learning English as an international language, the major goal of each educational system is to establish quality English education at its schools to improve and promote its society at different domains in this modern time. The current study briefly delineates the findings of a qualitative study on English education at schools in Iran and Finland. In order to collect valid and reliable data, a lot of recent and useful articles with respect to the topic were selected and studied by the author to compare English education at Iranian and Finnish schools (primary and high schools). After extracting some basic features of similarities and differences of English education at schools of both countries, these features were coded in numbers based on the hierarchy of importance and put in Tables 1 and 2. The most salient finding of this study revealed that there are more differences than similarities in English education between Iranian and Finnish schools. For instance, there are big discrepancies between public and private schools in Iran regarding initiation of English instruction at primary level, methodology, English teachers, textbooks and so on so forth in contrary to Finnish schools. Therefore, finding innovative methods to make quality English education so as to teach and learn English optimally at Iranian schools is a must for educational system of Iran. Thus, the study provides some suggestions for improvement of English education at Iranian schools.