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

Explore our diagnostic testing webinar

More blogs from app

  • children sat at a desk working together

    How to help students deal with conflict in group work

    By Rachael Roberts

    Is avoiding conflict always a good thing?

    Why is it that some groups work smoothly together, whereas for others it always seems to end in arguments? It may seem logical to avoid group work with classes where it often leads to disagreement, but is there such a thing as ‘healthy disagreement’?

    Perhaps the groups that appear to be working well together are actually just letting one or two people do everything? This would certainly avoid conflict, but they might also be avoiding learning very much.

    Sometimes conflict is a necessary step that teachers (of all subjects, not just language teachers) have to acknowledge as an important part of a learner's development.

  • a woman with headphones around her neck writing notes at a table

    How to reduce anxiety using to-do lists

    By Rachael Roberts

    Help reduce anxiety using to-do lists

    Many teachers have a to-do list a mile long or even several to-do lists in different places.

    Theoretically, a to-do list is a good idea. When we write something down, the brain can stop holding onto it quite as tightly, which can reduce anxiety and any feeling of overwhelm.

    This tendency to obsess about unfinished tasks is called the Ziergarnik effect, after the Russian psychologist Bluma Ziergarnik, who noticed that waiters only remembered orders before they were served. As soon as the meals were delivered, the memory vanished.

    So, if your brain is constantly nagging you about tasks that remain undone, write them down or make a rough plan and the anxiety will often disappear.

    The downside of ‘to-do’ lists

    I once had a list of jobs that needed doing about the house which had some items dating back several years. Simply writing down a task doesn’t guarantee that it will get done. A lengthy to-do list can enable you to procrastinate and avoid doing important tasks as they are hidden amongst any number of others.

    Long lists can also be overwhelming and off-putting in themselves, and as you cross items off the list becomes cluttered and disorganized.

    Making better use of your to-do list(s)

    1. Learn to prioritize

    It is vital to distinguish between tasks as this will help you decide how to prioritize, delegate and ignore. Categorize your tasks in the following way:

    • Important and urgent (prioritize these).
    • Important but not urgent (book in a time to do these, and stick to it).
    • Urgent but not important (see if you can delegate these, or consider if you need to do them at all).
    • Not urgent and not important (you could almost certainly take these off your list altogether).

    2. Keep separate lists for separate areas of your life

    It’s much easier to see what needs to be done and to prioritize things if you keep separate lists. If you are comfortable with tech, there are plenty of apps to help you with this. You can flag things as important and set reminders and deadline alerts while keeping separate lists. and are just a couple of the options available. If you’re more old school, you can have separate pages in a notebook.

    3. Break tasks down

    Understandably, you might avoid getting started on a big task that will take a long time. There never seems to be a suitable time slot to get it done. Instead, break it down into smaller tasks and tackle them one at a time. For example, break down marking 30 books into three slots of marking ten books.

    4. Know your next actions

    Before you finish work on part of a bigger task, make sure you know your next step, so that when you come back to it, you can get started straight away. This also works well when you decide at the end of a working day what the first task you’ll do tomorrow is.

    5. Review weekly

    A regular review is essential. Look through what you’ve achieved and feel good about it - and remove it from your lists. Analyse where you tried to do too much (try to stick to 3-5 tasks a day) and consider this when setting yourself tasks for the following week. Take note of any tasks you should have done but didn’t get around to and, assuming a certain task is a priority, decide exactly when you will do it next week.

    Good luck!

    Teaching requires you to juggle 101 different things, and that’s before you take your home life into account as well. Get on top of your to-do list, and not only will you feel less overwhelmed, but you may also even find yourself a bit more free time.

  • People of various backgrounds and ages standing together holding paper speech bubbles

    4 poor communication skills (and what to do about them)

    By Rachael Roberts

    How to help your students improve their general listening, speaking and understanding

    Do your students ever display poor communication skills?

    Most teachers will answer with a resounding ‘yes’. In fact, communication skills do not always come naturally to many people. Let’s look at some of the most common and egregious errors people make when speaking and listening to each other. I’ll also give you some valuable ways to help your students improve.

    1. They don’t even stop to breathe

    If you find one student doing a LOT of talking, it’s probably because no one else can get a word in edgeways. It can be tempting to assume that this is because the chatty student thinks their ideas are better than anyone else’s, but, in fact, it is often a sign of nerves.

    Look more carefully and see if they appear breathless or anxious. Whatever the reason, this kind of student may benefit from a more structured approach where students are given time to prepare what they are going to say, and everyone is expected to contribute equally. Or make it into a game where students have to make sure that they speak for 50% of the time each, as would be expected in an exam situation.

    2. They aren’t really paying attention to each other

    Whether your students are looking at their phones, staring out of the window or can’t wait to interrupt each other, poor listeners make poor communicators. Deal with this by always requiring the listener in any pair to do something specific. For example, tell them they will need to summarise what their partner said, or they have to think of three questions to ask their partner at the end.

    We usually have a reason to listen in real-life communication, so make sure you give them one. Otherwise, they may assume that only the teacher needs to pay attention when another student is talking.

    3. They ramble and it’s difficult to follow what they’re saying

    Students may ramble because they are unconfident about the target language. It’s fine for students to struggle a bit to communicate, but it’s sensible to set achievable tasks, or they may give up.

    It could also be that they would benefit from more rehearsal and practice. Being able to speak fluently ‘off the cuff’ is very challenging, particularly in front of an audience. Try giving students time to plan what they are going to say first. They shouldn’t be reading off the page, but writing it first can help with confidence and fluency.

    Repetition is also invaluable in building fluency. Try doing speaking tasks more than once, and see how the quality and quantity improves each time. You can ring the changes by swapping partners or changing the format from pairs to small groups, to the whole class.

    4. They don’t treat others’ feelings with respect

    This can show itself in different ways. Maybe your students just completely ignore the feelings the other person is demonstrating or telling them about. Or maybe they dismiss them in other ways, ‘Oh, exactly the same thing happened to me! I was just walking along…’

    You can model better ways to respond yourself. For example, “It sounds as if you feel quite angry about that?”, “That must have been really difficult.’

    This teaches students the kind of phrases they can use to validate, empathize and talk about emotions.

    If you can deal with these problems, your students will be well on the way to becoming master communicators.