All 11 Duolingo English Test question types
What each task looks like on screen, how long you get, how it is scored, and what loses people marks. Every one has a full guide with a worked example.
- Every task in the July 2025 format, drawn as you will see it
- How each one is scored, and what the scorer is looking at
- Playable demos on the tasks that allow one
A full Duolingo English Test draws on eleven distinct question types. You will not meet them in a fixed order or a fixed number — the test adapts — but you will meet all of them, and the single biggest avoidable loss on the DET is discovering how a task works while the timer for it is already running.
They divide naturally into three groups, and the grouping is worth knowing because the preparation for each is different.
Objectively marked tasks
Right or wrong, no rubric. The cheapest points on the test and the fastest to fix.
Read & Complete
A short passage appears with roughly every second word cut in half. You type the missing letters to restore each damaged word.
Read the guide → 5 secondsRead & Select
A single word appears. You decide whether it is a real English word or an invented one. Roughly half are invented.
Read the guide → 20 secondsFill in the Blanks
A sentence appears with one word partly deleted. The first letter or two are given; you type the rest.
Read the guide → 1 minuteListen & Type
You hear a sentence and type exactly what was said. You can replay it a limited number of times.
Read the guide →These four are scored by comparison against a correct answer, which makes them predictable in a way the productive tasks are not. They are also where most candidates are losing marks they do not need to lose — to empty blanks, to guessing on Read & Select, and to replaying audio before typing anything.
Productive tasks
You generate the language. Graded against a rubric, with relevance to the prompt gating everything else.
Speak About the Photo
An image appears and you describe it aloud.
Read the guide → 35 seconds eachInteractive Speaking
A short spoken conversation with an animated character. You hear one question at a time and record a reply to each, and every question builds on what you just said.
Read the guide → 1 minuteWrite About the Photo
An image appears and you write one or more sentences describing it.
Read the guide → 3 minutesSpeaking Sample
An extended spoken response to an open prompt. It is sent to institutions alongside your score.
Read the guide → 5 minutesWriting Sample
An extended written response to an open prompt. It is sent to institutions alongside your score.
Read the guide →These five carry your Writing and Speaking subscores — half of your overall — and they are the ones most candidates practise least. They share one failure mode above all others: answering a prompt other than the one that was asked. Fluent, well-organised English on the wrong subject scores as a poor response, not a middling one.
Extended interactive sets
Multi-step tasks built on one passage or one conversation. Together they take roughly a quarter of the hour.
Interactive Reading
A passage with five linked tasks: completing sentences, choosing what comes next, highlighting the part of the text that answers a question, identifying the main idea, and choosing a title.
Read the guide → 6 minutesInteractive Listening
A spoken conversation unfolds in turns. At each turn you choose the best reply, then afterwards answer comprehension questions and write a summary of what was said.
Read the guide →These two are under-practised relative to how much of the test they occupy, largely because they are harder to drill than a single-item task. Interactive Listening is the most valuable single task on the whole exam — it feeds both Listening and Writing, and so touches six of your eight reported subscores.
Two tasks the test no longer uses
The July 2025 update removed two speaking tasks and replaced them with Interactive Speaking. Their guides stay up for anyone who still meets a reference to them, but they are no longer on the test.
Every current task, timed and mapped
Timings and frequencies follow the published test format. Exact counts vary between sittings because the test adapts to how you are doing.
| Question type | Time | How often | Subscores it feeds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Read & Complete | 3 minutes | 3–6 times | Reading, Writing |
| Read & Select | 5 seconds | 15–18 times | Reading |
| Fill in the Blanks | 20 seconds | 6–9 times | Reading, Writing |
| Listen & Type | 1 minute | 6–9 times | Listening, Writing |
| Speak About the Photo | 90 seconds | at least once | Speaking |
| Interactive Speaking | 35 seconds each | 6–7 questions | Speaking, Listening |
| Write About the Photo | 1 minute | at least twice | Writing |
| Interactive Reading | 7 minutes | 2 sets | Reading |
| Interactive Listening | 6 minutes | 2 sets | Listening, Speaking |
| Speaking Sample | 3 minutes | once | Speaking |
| Writing Sample | 5 minutes | once | Writing |
Two rows are worth noticing. Read & Select appears more often than anything else, which makes a systematic error there expensive. And the two interactive sets take far more time than their two-appearances-each suggests — around thirteen minutes of a roughly sixty-minute test.
If you only have time for a few
Reading eleven guides is a lot. If you are short of time, the order that recovers the most marks per minute spent is:
Read & Select
Because the scoring penalises accepting invented words, and a candidate who has been clicking "real word" by default is losing a lot on the most frequent task in the test. This is a five-minute read that can be worth real points.
Read & Complete
Because partial credit is real and empty blanks are guaranteed zeros. The single habit of filling every box before time expires is the highest-value change on the reading side.
The Writing Sample
Because Writing is the most commonly neglected subscore, there is no spell-checker, and the last forty seconds spent proofreading are worth more than another sentence.
Listen & Type
Because the replay budget is routinely mismanaged, and typing before replaying is a habit you can adopt immediately.
After those, work from your own report rather than from a list. The task ranked worst on your last practice test is the one worth reading about next — how to prepare covers turning a report into a plan.
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