For those who are interested in the business of English testing, it is worth taking a second look at Table 2 in the new IELTS/TOEFL score concordance. It lists various first languages/first language groups and what percentage of the overall test taker population they made up back in 2022. If nothing else, they confirm some long standing assumptions about each test.
Note how 35.4% of TOEFL takers in 2022 used Chinese as a first language. It has long been known that China is TOEFL’s biggest market, but this number is higher than I would have guessed… even if we keep in mind that plenty of these folks took the test outside of China.
People with a first language in the Indian group made up 13.2% of all TOEFL testers. That’s a bit lower than I assumed.
Korean speakers made up 7.8% of TOEFL testers, and Japanese speakers made up 6.4%. That’s really something. China/Korea/Japan has always been the heartland of TOEFL… but a combined 50% of testers is startling. No wonder ETS is trying real hard to diversify their test taker population.
Spanish speakers made up 8.6% of TOEFL testers. This is due, in part, to the test’s traditional popularity in Mexico and in key South American markets like Colombia, Chile and Peru.
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Meanwhile, the chart shows us that 39.6% of IELTS test takers in 2022 spoke a language in the Indian group. Obviously India is critically important for the IELTS partnership.
Chinese speakers made up 15.8% of IELTS test takers. Given that IELTS-A (probably) has roughly a 3x larger worldwide footprint than TOEFL we might take this as a suggestion that IELTS is now bigger than TOEFL in China.
The third biggest language group among IELTS test takers was the South-East Asia group, representing 8.2% of all tests. Needless to say, I’ve written a ton in recent weeks about how important Vietnam is to this test.
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Note that it looks like the concordance study did not include test takers who listed English as their first language. Such testers make up a decent amount of each test’s overall population.
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It isn’t quite the same thing but, for reference, here are the top countries for the Duolingo English Test, based on test taker ID.
- India 18.91%
- Mainland China 15.88%
- Canada 4.35%
- South Korea 3.51%
- Brazil 3.42%
- United States 3.34%
- Mexico 3.12%
- Indonesia 2.78%
- France 2.09%
- Pakistan 1.94%