ESL Test

The ACCUPLACER ESL assesses your English skills if you have learned English as an additional language to your native or first language. The ACCUPLACER ESL is divided into sections. You will take three of these sections.

ACCUPLACER ESL Reading Skills

The Reading Skills test evaluates comprehension of short passages. There are 20 questions in this test. The content of passage is varied and deals with a variety of subjects including the arts, human relationships, physical science, history, social sciences, and practical situations.

Half of the Reading Skills test contains straightforward comprehension items (paraphrasing, locating information, vocabulary on a phrase level, and pronoun reference).

The other half assesses inference skills (main idea, fact vs. opinion, cause/effect logic, identifying irrelevant information, author’s point of view, and applying the author’s logic to another situation)

ACCUPLACER ESL Language Use

The Language Use test measures grammar and usage. There are 20 questions to this test. It contains questions in two formats: completing a sentence by filling in a blank with the word or phrase from the choices given, and choosing a sentence that best combines two given discrete sentences.

• Subject-verb agreement
• Verb tenses
• Irregular verbs
• Noun forms and pronouns
• Modifiers and comparatives
• Prepositions, connectives, and parallelism
• Sentence fragments or run-on sentences

ACCUPLACER ESL Sentence Meaning

Sentence Meaning assesses the understanding of word meanings in one or two-sentence contexts. There are 20 questions to this test. The sentences draw from the content areas of natural science, arts/humanities, human relationships, history, social sciences, and practical situations.

• Subject-verb agreement
• Verb tenses
• Irregular verbs
• Noun forms and pronouns
• Modifiers and comparatives
• Prepositions of direction and place

Comparatives, connectives, and commands