How to prepare for the Duolingo English Test

No. The speaking tasks are graded on how intelligible and fluent you are, not on which accent you have, so a strong regional accent that stays clear costs nothing. What does lose marks is mumbling, long hesitation and words the automatic transcriber cannot resolve, so practise speaking clearly at a steady pace rather than trying to sound like anyone in particular.

Practise thinking aloud under time rather than rehearsing set answers, because the July 2025 Interactive Speaking task reacts to what you say and a memorised speech will not fit the prompt you get. Record yourself responding to a photo or a question with no script, then check three things: that you filled the time, stayed on the point, and did not stall — those are what the task rewards.

Either. The test accepts both varieties, so neither scores higher on its own — use whichever materials suit you. What is worth doing is staying consistent within a single answer: writing colour in one line and color in the next reads as carelessness, so pick one and keep to it.

Most people do not. The test rewards knowing each task’s format and fixing your weakest skill, which full mocks, task guides and daily drills cover. A course or tutor helps when your speaking or writing needs regular human feedback, or when you need the structure of a schedule to keep going.

A full mock in week 1 to find your weakest subscore, two weeks of targeted drills on the question types behind it (with daily timed writing and speaking), and a final week with one or two full mocks under real conditions. The plan on this page sets it out week by week.

The ones your first mock shows are costing you most. If you have not taken one yet, start with the speaking and writing tasks (they are long, graded on a rubric and easy to improve with a clear structure) and Read and Select (pure vocabulary, many questions). Then work through the table of question types.

It depends on the size of the gap and what is causing it. Closing ten points is often a matter of learning the task formats and fixing timing habits, which is days rather than weeks. Closing thirty or more usually means genuine language gain, and that is measured in months. Progress also slows sharply above about 130 — the same effort buys fewer points at the top of the scale.

You can improve your performance in a week, which is not the same as improving your English. Learning the thirteen task formats, fixing the habits that lose marks — leaving blanks empty, clicking "real word" by default, not proofreading — and getting used to the timings will recover points you were losing to unfamiliarity. That is real, and it is bounded. Actual language gain does not happen on that timescale.

Find out which subscore is dragging your average and work there, rather than practising what you are already good at. Because the overall is a mean of four individual subscores, twenty points of weakness in one skill costs five points overall — and fixing that one skill is far cheaper than lifting all four. For most people the weak one is Writing or Speaking, because those are the skills that get least practice outside a classroom.

They answer different questions. Practice tests tell you where you are losing marks; grammar study is one of the things that fixes it. Taking mock after mock without analysing the results is the most common way to spend a lot of time and not improve — the diagnosis is the valuable part, not the score.

Enough to see a stable pattern rather than a single reading. Because any one score carries measurement error, two results five points apart tell you nothing; a consistent run tells you a lot. What matters more than the count is that you review each one properly before taking the next.

Structures, yes. Scripts, no. A reusable shape for a spoken answer or an essay saves you the planning time you do not have. A memorised paragraph rarely fits the prompt you actually get, and forcing it produces the off-topic drift that caps the score hardest — relevance gates the writing and speaking rubrics.

For the reading and vocabulary tasks, sustained reading is the underlying skill and practice questions only measure it. Read & Select in particular resists cramming, because freshly memorised words are half-known and half-known words are exactly what the invented items catch. Broad reading over weeks is what moves it.

Very little that is new. Check your equipment — camera, microphone, a stable connection, a quiet room you can control — because technical problems on the day cost more than any last-minute revision would have gained. Beyond that, review your own error log rather than starting fresh material.

It depends entirely on the size of your gap and whether it is technique or language. Learning the twelve formats and fixing habits is a handful of hours. Genuine language gain runs to dozens, and slows sharply above 130 where the same effort buys fewer points.

The diagnosis is what matters, not the company. A tutor is most valuable for writing and speaking, where you cannot reliably judge your own output — and least valuable for the objectively-marked reading tasks, where a report already tells you exactly what you got wrong.

A computer, with a real keyboard. The official test is taken on a laptop or desktop, and several tasks are typing-heavy under tight timers. Practising on a phone trains a typing speed you will not have on the day. If you only have a phone for now, use it for vocabulary and reading, and save typing and speaking practice for a computer.

Review it before you take another. Categorise every error — agreement, preposition, unknown word, ran out of time — because the category is your actual syllabus. Taking mock after mock without reviewing any of them is the most common way to spend a lot of time and not improve.