How to prepare for the Duolingo English Test: a skill-by-skill plan

Before you start: what you are preparing for

From the DET format guide: every task has its own timer, there is no back button, and harder items are worth more, so careless early answers lower your ceiling.How adaptive scoring works explains why practice percentages do not map onto the 10–160 scale.

The 2-week plan

About 45–60 minutes a day. Log every set: date, task type, score, and whether you finished in time.

The 4-week plan

Same drills, more room for vocabulary growth and production practice. Five or six days a week.

Some task types have only a few sets on this site. Repeating one is fine for timing practice, but a remembered answer tells you nothing, so count only first attempts in your log.

Reading: what to drill

• Read and Complete — restoring missing letters in a passage, scored on the exact letters. Highest-leverage habit: read the whole passage once before typing anything. Practise it.
• Read and Select — picking real words out of convincing fakes; wrong selections count against you. Habit: select a word only if you can say what it means. Practise it.
• Interactive Reading — one longer passage with linked question steps. Habit: find the sentence that settles each question before you answer. Practise it.

Complete the Sentence trains the same knowledge from the multiple-choice side and has the most reading sets here — good warm-up volume.

Listening: what to drill

• Listen and Type — dictation, scored on the exact words. Habit: type the small words (articles, prepositions, auxiliaries), then use the last seconds to check endings and spelling. Practise it.
• Listen and Select — real versus invented words, spoken aloud. Habit: ask “what does it mean?”, not “does it sound English?” Practise it.

Interactive Listening is on the real test, but this site has no drill for it yet. Build it with longer audio: podcasts or lectures where you pause and summarise each exchange out loud.

Writing: graded tasks versus the ungraded sample

This is where most plans go wrong, so be precise about which writing counts toward your score:

• Write About the Photo (graded). Describe an image in a sentence or two, against the clock. Habit: use one tiny structure every time — what it is, then a key detail, then a short inference. This site has no dedicated drill for it, so use the four scenes in the speaking lab as silent writing prompts.
• Interactive Writing (graded). Write for 5 minutes, then develop the response from a related follow-up for 3 minutes. Habit: in stage two, answer the follow-up directly with new content instead of restating stage one. Practise the two-stage timing.
• Writing Sample (ungraded). It does not move your 10–160 score or subscores, but it is sent to the institutions you choose. Habit: a position, two points and one concrete example each, then a reread for obvious slips.

Speaking: what to drill

The graded speaking tasks are Picture Description, Extended Speaking and Interactive Speaking; the Speaking Sample is ungraded and goes to institutions. The speaking task guide covers all four, and the speaking lab has original prompts for each.

• Picture Description: scene, then two or three details, then what the picture suggests.
• Extended Speaking: claim, reasons, so-what — and keep talking until the time is used.
• Interactive Speaking: answer the question actually asked before you expand. The lab’s follow-ups are fixed, while the real test chooses them adaptively.

Highest-leverage habit across all four: start speaking as soon as the response window opens. Silence scores nothing, and hesitation costs more than a small grammar slip.

How to tell if your preparation is working

“I feel more ready” is not evidence. These checks are:

1. Accuracy trend per task type. Compare this week’s first attempts with last week’s on the same task type. One set is noise, and a week of sets is a trend. The progress panel on the TestDayTwin home page shows your per-skill averages and your latest five scored attempts for the browser you practise in.
2. Timing. Our objective drills run at the real per-question pace of about one minute each. If you finish with time left and your accuracy holds, the mechanics are becoming automatic. If accuracy drops when you speed up, they are not yet.
3. Word-level dictation. Our Listen and Type drills give one point per correct word. For every lost word, write down why: a small grammar word, an ending, a spelling, a synonym, or genuinely not heard. It is working when the first four causes shrink.
4. False selections. In Read and Select and Listen and Select, count fakes you ticked separately from real words you missed. Fewer false ticks means your judgement is getting sharper, even before your vocabulary grows.
5. Speaking against a stated checklist. After each recording, tick only what is honestly true:
   • I responded immediately and kept speaking until the task was complete.
   • I developed connected ideas instead of listing isolated words.
   • I used precise vocabulary and a mix of sentence structures.
   • My pronunciation, rhythm, and pace were consistently understandable.
   It is working when you tick three or four items on a fresh prompt, not only on one you have rehearsed.
6. Writing stage two. Reread your Interactive Writing: does the 3-minute part add something new that answers the follow-up? Count the slips you find on the reread, and aim for fewer each week.

What these checks cannot tell you. A fixed third-party worksheet can reproduce task mechanics, but it cannot reproduce Duolingo’s calibrated item bank or generate an official adaptive score — ours included. Use Duolingo’s own free official practice test when you need an estimated score, and use this site for targeted drilling between those checks. Never convert a practice percentage into a DET score.

Speaking confidence and pronunciation: a self-feedback routine

Our speaking lab does not give live pronunciation feedback. You are the feedback, and the routine below makes that reliable. Recordings stay in your browser.

1. Record one response under the lab timer.
2. Listen twice: once for content (did you start at once, connect ideas, vary structures?) and once only for sound (words a listener might mishear, pace, rhythm).
3. Pick one fix, such as one mispronounced word, a rushed ending or a long pause before the first sentence.
4. Re-record the same prompt with “Record again” and compare the two takes.
5. Move to a fresh prompt to check the fix carries over.

Confidence is mostly the first five seconds: with an automatic structure you always know your opening sentence. Graded speaking is machine-scored from your recording and rewards sustained, connected, intelligible speech; for Duolingo’s own account, read how Duolingo measures speaking. If you can, have a fluent speaker hear one recording a week.

Questions learners ask

DET format facts — timing, task types, the 10–160 score and the ungraded sample stage — per Duolingo’s official test pages, as verified for our DET format guide(July 2026). Practice-page details reviewed September 22, 2026. The DET is adaptive, so the exact mix of tasks varies per sitting. TestDayTwin is independent of Duolingo.