Nguyen Quoc Nam Anh from southern Vietnam has confounded English examiners by passing a university-level English proficiency test, at the age of eight.
Anh scored 550 out of a maximum 660 points in the Test Of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), according to Nguyen Thai Binh Long, office manager at the Foreign Language Centre of Vietnam National University, where the girl took the test late last month.
”I think this is outstanding,” said Nguyen Thai Binh Long, who supervised the two-hour-long test.
”A normal score for a 17-year-old high school student is between 400 and 450, with high performing students achieving 500, so 550 is a very good score,” Long said.
The TOEFL exam is used to test students’ English levels who want to study at American universities, something Anh aspires hopes to do eventually.
”I study English because I would like to study abroad,” Anh said, with a slight American accent on Monday.
”I would eventually like to be a doctor in the US.”
Her father spotted that she had exceptional talent at the age of three and began to pay for extra English lessons when she was five, he said.
She could use a computer at a young age and first started with some English CD games such as Jump Start Pre-School and Learning Ladder when she was about three-and-half, said Nguyen Quoc Viet, the 40-year-old proud father. At four, she learned by heart and could deliver with considerable accuracy a speech by Bill Clinton.
Anh — whose favourite book in English is Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles — studied for the test for between three and four hours every day for about five weeks before she took it, Viet said.
Russian was the most learned language for previous generations of Vietnamese, but English language schools have been expanding massively in recent years.
As Vietnam’s economy moves from a centralised one to a more free-market model, Vietnam’s middle-class is growing and university study abroad programmes are becoming increasingly popular. – Sapa-DPA