Duolingo English Test (DET), which takes pride in rapidly being available, affordable, and accessible globally, is launching a set of new features that are intended to provide individuals with more accurate, interactive, and beneficial measurement of English competence. New developments take effect on July 1, 2025, and are an enhancement on Duolingo’s continuous efforts in making its test valid and reliable to all learners and schools worldwide.

The most striking change is the addition of a whole new interactive speaking section. The new section has been specifically created to test a broad range of spoken English skills ranging from fluency and clarity to pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. As opposed to the previous highly formalized speaking sub-tests, the new version welcomes test-takers into a more natural and conversational context. Every question here has six to eight follow-up questions that are related to each question with each question building upon the previous one, mimicking more spontaneous dialogue or monologue pattern. The test-takers have 35 seconds per question, a design element meant to facilitate spontaneous, off-the-cuff speaking, similar to if students were in class discussion or presentations. The new speaking format not only examines language skill but also the examinee’s skill to remain attentive, articulate well, and communicate ideas efficiently within time constraints.

Along with making the speaking component stronger, Duolingo also made the interactive listening component a lot stronger. A new task titled ‘Listen and Complete’ has been introduced to more effectively examine a pupil’s skill in listening to spoken English in school contexts. In this activity, students hear a short audio recording that is a real-life scenario—i.e., an on-campus discussion or class conversation—and are then required to complete three or four blanks to finish the transcript. The activity is followed by a listening and response task and a summary writing task. The series is designed to challenge several skills simultaneously: listening for detail, understanding academic vocabulary, reading for context, and synthesizing the information into a clear summary. These modifications make the experience more similar to what students commonly experience during lectures, seminars, or group work in English-speaking academic environments.

In order to streamline the test and have its duration less than an hour, two conventional question types—’Read Aloud’ and ‘Listen, Then Speak’—are no longer included in Duolingo. Although useful in earlier versions of the test, these drills were less effective as measures for assessing usage of the language in real life. With the new setup, all question types are relevant, interactive, and equal to academic standards of communication. In addition, the minimum response time condition has been removed from some tasks such as ‘Listen, Then Speak’, ‘Speak About the Photo’, ‘Read, Then Speak’, ‘Writing Sample’, ‘Speaking Sample’, and ‘Interactive Writing’. This action enables test takers to naturally pace themselves in response without being required to achieve an artificial response time, resulting in more natural language usage.

These groundbreaking changes are also a part of Duolingo’s more ambitious mission to make proficiency testing in English more student-centered and sensitive to the demands of modern scholarship. The DET is already used by over 5,900 institutions across the world, including all eight Ivy League universities in the United States. By continually adapting to match evolving education demands, Duolingo is not just a testing provider but also a key player in the global education system.

The new DET is accessible on all media platforms and can be tested from their home with a smartphone or laptop. In order to make the students familiar with the new format, Duolingo provides a free practice test which is a simulation of the new experience. This not only makes the test takers confident but also familiarizes them with the new expectations and format before taking the actual test.

All these changes are at a time when institutions more than ever are looking for assessment tools that measure authentic communication abilities and not mere memorization or contrived constructs. The Duolingo English Test, through its recent changes, establishes a new standard of language testing wherein students are rightly, practically, and meaningfully, tested as per what is most necessary in academic activities.