Comparison of the skills elicited by IELTS Academic and Duolingo English Test

Expert English language researchers at Georgia State University have compared IELTS Academic and Duolingo English Test (DET). Download the full research report or read our article for a recap.

	IELTS	DET
Listening	Test items elicit the following skills: Understand main ideas and detailed factual information Understand the opinions and attitudes of speakers Understand the purpose of an utterance Follow the development of ideas	Test items elicit the following skills: Distinguish words from non-words presented aurally Transcribe sentences presented aurally; hold input in short-term memory long enough to transcribe sentences
Summary: listening appears to be the most under-represented of all the skills in DET, compared with IELTS. DET appears to be based solely on intensive listening for vocabulary and grammatical structures, rather than listening for meaning or to understand the gist of extended discourse, which are essential skills for academic success.
Reading	Test items elicit the following skills: Read for the general sense of a passage Read for main ideas and details Understand inferences and implied meanings Recognize writer’s opinions, attitudes, and purposes Follow the development of an argument	Test items elicit the following skills: Distinguish English words from non-words Read and complete: Use lexical and syntactic knowledge to complete gapped words in a short passage Interactive Reading: five item types as follows: Complete sentences with gapped words Complete paragraphs with happed sentence Locate the answer to a comprehension question Choose the idea that is present in the text Choose the best title for the text
Summary: a detailed comparison between the IELTS Academic Reading and the DET Reading section reveals that DET assesses a much narrower range of reading purposes and cognitive processes.
Writing	Task description Describe or explain information presented in a chart, graph or table Write an essay in response to a point of view, argument or problem	Task description Write at least one sentence describing a photo Write a short response to a question prompt
Summary: to our knowledge, Duolingo does not provide examples of scripts from any of the Writing tasks, so it is impossible to provide comparative data. However, given the general nature of the prompts and the brevity of expected responses (at least 50 words, maximum of five minutes) it would be surprising to find similar levels of lexical and syntactic complexity, or a variety of cohesive devices, in DET written responses.
Speaking	Test items elicit the following skills: Providing personal information Expressing and justifying opinions Expressing preferences Explaining, suggesting, speculating, comparing, summarizing, narrating¹	Test items elicit the following skills: Providing personal information Expressing and justifying opinions Explaining, describing, narrating
Summary: while both tests require spoken production and invoke at some level the skills involved in monologue speaking, they are not at all equivalent in terms of spoken interaction. In DET, there is no opportunity to demonstrate the ability to interact with another speaker in real time.

¹This list comes from Taylor and Chan’s (2015) analysis; other discourse management functions may be possible.

Comparison of the skills elicited by IELTS Academic and Duolingo English Test

	IELTS	DET
Listening skills invoked in responding to test items
Input decoding	Yes	Yes
Lexical search	Yes	Yes
Parsing	Yes	Yes
Meaning construction	Yes
Reading skills invoked in responding to test items
Word recognition	Yes ²	Yes
Lexical access	Yes³	Yes
Syntactic parsing	Yes⁴	Yes
Establishing propositional meaning	Yes
Inferencing	Yes
Building a mental model	Yes
Creating a text-level representation	Yes
Reading goals
Careful reading: Local	Yes	Yes
Careful reading: Global	Yes
Expeditious reading: Local	Yes
Expeditious reading: Global	Yes
Writing skills invoked in responding to test items
Microplanning	Yes	Yes
Translation	Yes	Yes
Monitoring	Yes	Yes
Macroplanning	Yes
Organization	Yes
Revising	Yes
Speaking skills invoked in responding to test items
Grammatical encoding	Yes	Yes
Morpho-phonological encoding	Yes	Yes
Phonetic encoding	Yes	Yes
Articulation	Yes	⁵
Conceptualization	Yes
Self-monitoring	Yes
Speaking interaction pattern
Planning time allowed	Yes	Yes
Reciprocal interaction (face-to-face)	Yes
Sustained speaking on a topic for more than 30 seconds	Yes

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²Skills in parenthesis are not directly tested, but are enabling skills to complete other reading tasks.
³Skills in parenthesis are not directly tested, but are enabling skills to complete other reading tasks.
⁴Skills in parenthesis are not directly tested, but are enabling skills to complete other reading tasks.
⁵Conceptualization: may be invoked only minimally, given the brevity of the task