There is an article in the Financial Times which rehashes some of the discussions that folks in the UK have been having over the past few weeks. The opening sentence is “[a] growing number of UK universities are using a test developed by language-learning app Duolingo to judge whether foreign students speak good enough English to enrol on their courses.”
The article includes some sample items from the Duolingo English Test and the IELTS Test. Specifically, a sample of Duolingo’s “Is this a real word” task and a multiple choice academic reading task from the IELTS. I’m not sure this is fair. Perhaps it would have been better to compare the IELTS academic reading task to the Duolingo interactive reading task. Below a sample of that item type.
