The academic world has changed substantially in recent years. Lecture halls are hybrid. Office hours happen over Zoom. Group projects live in shared Google Docs. But while the way students use English at university has evolved, language tests haven’t always kept up.
That’s why we conducted a multi-institutional study to revisit a critical question: What English language skills do international students actually need to succeed in today’s universities?
The answer, we discovered, includes a growing set of technology-mediated language skills—ones that many current proficiency tests still don’t measure.
Why we need a new lens on language skills
For decades, English language proficiency (ELP) tests have focused on the “core four”: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. But those skills are increasingly intertwined with how students use digital tools. Think reading PDFs, writing collaboratively in real-time, navigating learning management systems, or even adjusting playback speed on lecture videos.
If a student is expected to perform these tasks daily, shouldn't our tests reflect that reality?
Listening to faculty and students
To find out what skills matter most, we surveyed over 800 participants—international students and their instructors—at eight English-medium universities in the U.S., U.K., and Ireland. We asked how often students use different types of language skills, and how important those skills are to their academic success.
Here’s what we learned:
- Students consistently rated productive skills (like clearly organizing pieces of writing) as most essential.
- Instructors tended to emphasize receptive skills, like understanding lectures and assignment directions.
- Both groups agreed: digital reading and writing tasks, like typing on a computer or reading on-screen, are now more common and more important than paper-based ones.
- And while in-person speaking and listening still play a major role, technology-mediated communication (think Zoom classes and online discussions) is increasingly a part of everyday academic life.
What this means for language testing
Our findings highlight an important truth: today’s academic language environment is multimodal, digital, and dynamic. And if we want our assessments to remain valid and fair, they must evolve alongside that environment.
For example, current high-stakes ELP tests rarely assess a student’s ability to interact via text-based chat or comprehend multimodal presentations. Yet these are skills many students use regularly.
At the Duolingo English Test, we’re already incorporating these insights. Our digital-first design, adaptive technology, and ongoing research help ensure our test reflects how language is used now—not how it was used decades ago.
Tests should reflect how students use language now
The way we define and measure English proficiency needs to keep pace with students’ lived reality. That means designing assessments that are inclusive of diverse learner experiences, responsive to emerging technologies, and valid for testing the digital tasks students actually perform.