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The Best Templates for the Duolingo English Test

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Templates are a very effective way to raise your score on DET writing and speaking questions. At Arno, we've created templates that over 200,000 students around the world have relied on to get great scores.

Before we jump in, let's briefly discuss something critical: Templates are NOT memorized answers. Templates give you a skeleton or plan for your response. But you still have to come up with original ideas that are directly relevant to the question. If you use memorized responses, Duolingo won't certify your results, and they could even suspend your account or give you a lifetime ban from the DET. So, don't use memorized full sentences, paragraphs, or responses on the test.

Table of Contents

The Best Template for Write About the Photo

Our 3-sentence template for Write About the Photo is our most popular. Here's how it works:

Sentence #1: General Description

What is the first thing that you notice in the image? Here are sentence starters you can use for this first sentence:

  1. This image shows…
  2. This image depicts…
  3. In this image, we can see…
  4. In this picture, there is/are…

Sentence #2: Focus on a Detail

Pick a specific detail and describe it. Don’t waste time thinking about what to pick. Just describe the first detail you notice.

Sentence #3: Speculate

Ask yourself, “Why are things the way they are?” and make a guess.

Here are four useful vocab terms and phrases you can use in this sentence:

  1. Perhaps…
  2. Presumably…
  3. Judging by…
  4. It may be the case that…

Your speculation should be reasonable – meaning, specific aspects of the image should support your guess.

Let's go through an example so that you can see this template in action.

Sentence #1 (General Description): This image depicts five elderly men sitting in front of a coffee shop.

Sentence #2 (Focus on a detail): The man on the right is facing the camera and is holding a red fan in his right hand.

Sentence #3 (Speculate): Perhaps these men are lifelong friends who meet up regularly to drink tea or coffee and chat.

You can download a PDF with this 3-sentence template here. We also have a full lesson that explains this template in more detail and provides more examples:

On our YouTube channel, we also have an entire playlist with even more strategies, tips, and vocabulary for picture description.

The Best Template for Summarize the Conversation (Interactive Listening)

We also have a popular 3-sentence template for Summarize the Conversation.

Sentence #1: In this conversation, I talked with ____ about ____.

Sentence #2: Describe something that was revealed during the conversation

Sentence #3: Describe a second thing that was revealed during the conversation

So that you have the information that you need to effectively use this template, you need save ~30 seconds to review the scenario and conversation before you proceed to the Summarize the Conversation question.

While reviewing the scenario and conversation, you should mentally answer these 4 questions:

  1. Who was in the conversation?
  2. Why did we talk?
  3. What did we talk about?
  4. What are 2 new pieces of information revealed during the conversation?

Here's an example:

In this conversation, I talked with my urban planning professor about how to apply to graduate school. My professor told me that the first step was to find a professor that I wanted to work with. She also recommended that I consider funding opportunities provided by schools and the schools' locations since graduate school can last many years.

Here is a PDF print out with this template. We also created another PDF print out with the most useful vocab that you can use for Summarize the Conversation questions.

For more information about this template, including more examples, check out our full lesson:

The Best Templates for Interactive Writing, Read Then Speak, Writing Sample, and Speaking Sample

Unfortunately, there is not one template that you can use for the extended writing and speaking questions because the prompts can be so different.

There are three types of prompts you can be given on the test:

  1. Argue: State your opinion and defend it
  2. Recount: Tell a story from your past
  3. Describe: Share information about some topic

Argue Prompts

There are a few kinds of Argue prompts.

Some ask you What is your opinion? or for those you can use this template:

Others ask you Do you agree or disagree? and here's the template for those kinds of prompts:

Finally, some Argue prompt asks you to discuss the pros & cons of something. You can use this template:

Recount Prompts

For Recount prompts, you just need to do two things: Tell a good story and then reflect about how that experience changed you or the world. To help you do that, you should learn some key vocabulary, which we've put into this PDF print out and which we explain in this lesson.

We also have a full lesson about how to structure your responses to Recount prompts:

We also prepared a lesson with example answers for Recount prompts so that you can see how high-scoring responses are structured and how to use the vocabulary I mentioned above.

Describe Prompts

For Describe prompts, you should focus on writing strong paragraphs. A strong paragraph starts a clear topic sentence that captures the main idea of the whole paragraph. A strong paragraph also has supporting sentences that explain your main idea and provide examples to demonstrate what you mean.

Here is a full lesson on Describe prompts that teaches you how to structure your responses:

We also have a lesson with high-scoring example answers to Describe prompts.

How to Practice With These Templates

To master these templates, you need to practice with them. For that, Arno is great 😁

With a free Arno account, you get unlimited practice questions for every DET question type for free. Every new Arno user also gets a full, free mock test with subscores and detailed feedback on all your responses. Click here to create your free account.

On our paid plans, you can get instant scoring and detailed feedback on your responses to writing and speaking questions.

Arno gives you an estimated score and shows you the strengths and weaknesses of your response.
The Arno Grammar Tutor makes it easy to fix and learn from your grammar mistakes.
Arno also gives you a personalized rewrite of your response, showing how to improve your phrasing and vocabulary.

Join the 200,000+ students around the world who have used Arno to get great scores on the DET!