Lessons fill part of your week. The hours outside class decide whether you come home fluent or with a tan and the same level. In Malta the risk is specific: most of your classmates speak your language. Here is the data behind that, and ten habits that keep English as your default between lessons.
The problem in numbers
The NSO release on Teaching English as a Foreign Language for 2025 describes the student body at Malta’s licensed schools:
- 76,063 foreign students over the year, staying 3.4 weeks on average.
- 71.8 per cent from EU countries.
- Italy alone at 23.0 per cent, then Germany at 10.6 per cent and France at 10.4 per cent.
- July and August as the busiest months, with 16.5 and 15.8 per cent of the year’s attendance.
- Half the students aged 17 or under.
So in July, an adult Italian student may well find several compatriots in the same class and dozens in the same building. Nothing stops you from speaking Italian at the coffee break. That is the habit to break.
Ten habits that work
1. Choose your timing
March, the third busiest month at 9.6 per cent, and the autumn months bring smaller groups and fewer juniors. If your dates are flexible, the shoulder season gives you a different class mix. Adults also find fewer junior groups in the corridors outside the summer months, when the share of under-18s peaks.
2. Ask about the nationality mix before you book
A licensed school knows the expected mix for your dates and course. Ask for it in writing. Our guide on checking a school’s licence lists the other questions worth asking.
3. Live where English is the house language
A host family without another student from your country gives you breakfast and dinner in English every day. A flat shared with classmates from home usually gives you none.
4. Make a group rule
Agree with your classmates that English is the language of the group, in class and out. Set the rule on day one: once a group has settled into another language, the habit is hard to change.
5. Run your errands in English
The pharmacy, the bus driver, the bank, the phone shop: every one of them speaks English. Ask a question at the counter instead of pointing. Our guides to getting a SIM card and opening a bank account are good first missions.
6. Go where locals speak English
The 2021 census found that English was the first language from early childhood for 37.7 per cent of Maltese nationals in Swieqi, and for a little over a quarter in Sliema and St Julian’s. Cafés, gyms and clubs in those towns give you English conversations with people who are not students. Our page on how English and Maltese share the island explains the rest of the picture.
7. Join something with a schedule
A sports club, a running group, a dance class, a volunteer clean-up. A fixed weekly slot with the same people builds the kind of repeated conversation that improves fluency. One-off parties rarely do.
8. Work a few hours, if your status allows it
A part-time job forces English for hours at a time, with customers who do not adjust their speed for you. Check first whether you are allowed to work: the rules differ for EU and non-EU students, and our guide to part-time work while you study sets them out.
9. Switch your media
Set your phone to English. Read a Maltese news site in English with your morning coffee: several national titles publish in English and cover the island you are living on, which makes the vocabulary stick. Watch series with English subtitles, not your own.
10. Keep a phrase notebook
Every evening, write down three expressions you heard during the day and did not know. Reuse them the next day. It takes five minutes and turns passive listening into active vocabulary.
Measure it
Fluency is hard to feel from the inside. Two simple checks:
- Count the hours you spoke English outside class this week. Aim for more than the hours you spent in class.
- Record yourself for two minutes describing your day, in week one and again in your final week. The difference is your result.
- Ask your teacher, at the end of week two, which mistakes you repeat most. Build your evening practice around those two or three errors rather than around general vocabulary.
If you are working towards a certificate, add a practice test halfway through your stay. The guide to English exams in Malta explains the options.
The one thing to remember
Malta gives you English everywhere: in shops, offices, buses and on the radio. It also makes it easy to slip back into your own language with classmates. The students who improve fastest treat English as the language they live in, not the language they study in.
