What to look for in an English placement test

Jennifer Manning
Students working outdoors, two of them are looking over a open book

If you’re an English teacher, Director of Studies or school owner you’ll know the importance of putting students in the right group. Whether it’s a business English class, exam prep or general English – a placement test is essential. Without one, you’ll teach classes with such varied levels and needs, it’ll be hard to plan an effective lesson.

Placing students at the wrong level will not only lead to unmotivated learners, but it may also cost your institution money.

But how exactly do you design a reliable, accurate and easy-to-use test? In this post, we’ll examine the key questions you need to consider before making your own placement test. We’ll also explore what features you need to achieve your goals.

Problems with traditional placement tests

Most private language schools (PLSs) and higher education institutions offer new students the opportunity to take a placement test before starting a course. However, these are often just a multiple-choice test, a short interview, or a combination of the two.

While this does act as a filter helping us group students into similar levels, there are a number of downfalls. Students can guess the answers to multiple-choice questions – and while they might give us a rough idea of their grammar knowledge, these tests don’t consider the four skills: speaking, writing, listening and reading.

Oral interviews, on the other hand, can give us an indication of the students’ spoken level. However, they also raise questions of objectivity and consistency that even specially trained teachers will struggle to avoid.

Another big issue with traditional tests is the amount of time they take. Multiple-choice exams are often graded by hand and interviewing every new student uses valuable resources that could be used elsewhere.

Key questions to consider

Before you re-design your current test completely, we’ve put together a series of questions to help you think about your objectives, define your needs and explore the challenges you may face.

Taking a few minutes to think about these things can make the process of finding the right English placement test go more smoothly and quickly. Once you know what you’re looking for, you’ll be ready to make a checklist of the most important features.

What will your test be used for?

  • Placing incoming ESL students into the appropriate English language program.
  • Measuring students’ progress throughout the school year.
  • Final assessment of students' abilities at the end of the school year (“exit test”).
  • All of the above.

Is this different from what you use your current test for? How soon are your needs likely to change?

What skills does your current test measure?

Does it measure speaking, listening, reading, writing, or all of the above? Are all of these skills measured in separate tests — or in one test?

  • How many students do you need to test at each intake?
  • How many students do you need to test each year? How many do you expect you’ll need to test in three years?

How quickly do you currently receive test results? How quickly would you like to receive them?

If you can test your students weeks before the start of the school term, you may have time to wait for results. However, if you are continuously testing students, or have students arriving just before the term begins, you may need to get results much more quickly.

What features in your current test do you like and dislike?

Are there things in your current test that you also want in your new test? Is anything missing, or anything that you don’t want your new test to have?

What resources are available to you?

Some English language tests require students to have the computer skills needed to take the test online. You may also need a testing lab that has the following:

  • computers
  • a stable internet connection
  • a headset with a built-in microphone
  • a preliminary checklist for placement tests.

Once you’ve got answers to the questions, you can use the checklist below to make sure your placement test has the features you need. It may also be useful for comparing products if you decide to use an external placement test.

A preliminary checklist for placement tests

What features do you need to achieve your goals?

Now that you've analyzed how you want to use your new English Placement test, create a checklist of the features that you need to achieve your goals.

Usability

  • The ability to test large numbers of students at one time
  • Fast and easy set-up and test implementation
  • Only brief training is necessary to learn to use the test
  • Total completion time is less than one hour
  • Automatic scoring by computer (no hand scoring)
  • Immediate results - the administrator can see results as soon as the testing period is over

Scalability

  • Includes administrative tools at no extra cost
  • includes everything needed to deploy the tests, without requiring the purchase of additional equipment

Security

  • Test forms that are randomized to prevent cheating
  • Secure reporting to ensure test information remains confidential

Test results

  • Automated scoring that can recognize and analyze speech components from both fluent and second-language English speakers
  • Comprehensive reporting that lets you easily compare scores with other Test scores, such as CEFR, GSE, IELTS and TOEFL

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    4 key challenges in secondary education

    By Anna Roslaniec

    Let’s examine four of the most common challenges secondary teachers have and look into some strategies to help solve them.

    1. My students are afraid of making mistakes

    You’re not alone! Many teachers say their teenage students are quiet and unwilling to answer questions in class. Sometimes, this might simply be because they don’t know the answers, but more often than not, they are nervous about making mistakes.

    When children grow into teenagers, they tend to become more self-conscious and worried about what their peers think of them – and making mistakes in public is a big no-no for them. However, there are several ways to facilitate a safe learning environment where your students are happy and willing to talk. Sometimes, though, it takes a little experimentation. Here are some things you can try:

    Celebrate mistakes

    When students make mistakes, ensure that you praise them for taking a risk or making an effort. Correct their errors and be clear with the rest of the class that the only way to learn is to try new things.

    Be firm

    Don’t tolerate any bullying or laughing when someone gets an answer wrong. If your students fear that others will mock them for their efforts, they’ll stay quiet. So make sure you have clear rules and that your students understand that mistakes are normal and to be expected.

    Have students discuss their answers in pairs or groups

    If your students are painfully shy and afraid of making mistakes, avoid picking on individuals to answer questions in front of the class. Instead, when asking a question, tell your students to discuss it in pairs or small groups first. This will allow them to formulate their ideas and feel more confident. Afterwards, you can ask the pairs to share what they discussed – leading to a natural open-class discussion.

    Listen to your students

    Another, powerful way of engaging your students in discussion is to listen to a conversation they are having with their partners and then express how impressed you are with their ideas during a feedback session. E.g. “You said X, which I thought was very interesting. Could you explain this to the class? It was a great idea.” This gives them the confidence to share their thoughts.

    2. My students are not engaged with the activities I choose

    This is another very common problem for teachers of teenagers. You spend a lot of time thinking of fun, interesting activities – then, when you present them to the class, your students look away and say they’re bored. Soon enough, you’ll get frustrated and not know how to re-engage them. Here are some ideas to help:

    Get to know your students

    Without fail, the best way to engage your students is by getting to know them as individuals over the year. Find out about their hobbies and interests outside of school, and learn what makes them laugh and what worries them. Use your knowledge of your students to find interesting books to read, videos to watch, or relevant subjects to discuss. This way, you’ll deliver tailored lessons your students find truly interesting and useful.

    Allow a degree of autonomy

    Sometimes quietness is also a sign of disengagement with the learning materials. To get past this obstacle, you can get your students to brainstorm things that interest them in groups, list them on the board and have a class vote on the topic of their next class project. As a teacher, you always have the power to veto inappropriate ideas, but giving students a voice is a powerful way of making them feel valued and involved in their own education.

    Make things (a little) competitive

    Even teenagers love games! And play is an integral part of learning, as it allows our students to be themselves, have fun, and communicate freely at the same time. By allowing them to play language-focused games in class, they’ll soon forget their inhibitions and start talking.

    3. My students just want to do grammar exercises

    Language is all about communication, speaking, listening, reading and writing – yet all your students want to do is grammar exercises. Frustrating as this is, it’s probably a sign that our students are not confident in their speaking or listening abilities. Here’s what you can do:

    Encourage free language practice

    Grammar activities are very structured and there is often a clear answer. Day-to-day communications, however, are much freer, which can intimidate less confident students. This activity will help you combine the two aspects of language learning:

    • Put students in small groups and give them a set of cards with exciting topics printed on them—for example; music, sports, environment, school, vacations, friends, food.
    • Tell students that they should each choose a card and speak freely about their topic for 30 seconds – the short time will help them overcome their fear of speaking and can be gradually increased as they get used to this type of activity.
    • Have students record themselves when they are speaking and then, when they listen back, have them identify the grammatical structures they used.

    They should write down and correct any mistakes under your guidance. Not only will this get students used to talking and encourage a lot of emergent language, but it will also help them feel they are practicing grammar.

    If your students really enjoy learning grammar, you can ‘flip’ your grammar activities and make them more communicative. First, provide them with a series of sentences or listening clips which have a common grammatical structure (second conditional sentences, for example).

    Then have students work together (in English) to identify how the language is structured, so they can discover the grammar point for themselves. This not only gets them talking, but they are doing something they feel confident at.

    4. My students are bored of all the repetition

    Repetition is an important part of language learning. By practicing things over and over again, your students will come to understand it better and will be able to produce the language more easily. However, repetition is often quite dull, especially for fast learners. Here’s how you can make things more interesting for your teenage students:

    Use a greater variety of activities to engage your learners

    If you’ve been teaching your students a particular set of vocabulary, a grammatical structure, or some pronunciation rules, think about how else they can practice them.

    For example, instead of drilling pronunciation over and over again, ask students to think of all the words they can think of that have the same sound in them (e.g. book, look, cook, shook, etc.). This will help them ‘hear’ the sounds in their heads and improve their understanding of other words.

    If you have been learning vocabulary through reading, have students write or tell stories that incorporate the words.

    The idea is not to stop repeating the target language or skill, but to practice it in different ways. Apply this principle to other areas of language learning so your students won’t feel like they are repeating things.