How PTE scores are built: communicative and enabling skills

A PTE score report looks simple at first: one big number from 10 to 90. Underneath it sit ten more numbers, and those ten are where a study plan should come from. If you watch only the overall score, you know that something is wrong without knowing where.

The overall score and the skills under it

Your overall score is reported on the 10 to 90 scale and is worked out from your performance across the whole test. Pearson's published score guide describes how, and this post does not guess at weights or percentages. What matters for planning is that the report also splits your result into two sets of skills.

Communicative skills are the four you would expect: Listening, Reading, Speaking and Writing. Enabling skills are the building blocks underneath them. In plain words:

• Grammar: using correct sentence structures.
• Oral Fluency: speaking smoothly, at a natural pace, without long hesitations or restarts.
• Pronunciation: sounds and stress that a listener can understand easily.
• Spelling: spelling correctly the words you type.
• Vocabulary: using words that are accurate and suitable, with a reasonable range.
• Written Discourse: organising and linking your writing so that it reads as one connected piece.

A low communicative score tells you where it hurts. The enabling skills help to tell you why.

One answer can feed several skills

A response is not scored for only one thing. Read Aloud is a speaking task, but it also counts towards Reading, and it feeds Oral Fluency and Pronunciation. Reading and Writing: Fill in the Blanks feeds the two skills in its name. Summarize Spoken Text is a listening task whose answer you write, so it touches both Listening and Writing. Pearson's score guide shows which tasks feed which skills, and it should be your reference rather than these examples, because task formats change. One answer, several skills looks at this in more detail.

Scoring is automated, so the computer responds to what you actually produced. Memorised, off-topic or very short responses can be penalised, which is a good reason to practise flexible language instead of scripts.

Trace a weak score back to a task

Here is an illustrative set of practice scores, made up to show the method:

• Communicative: Listening 62, Reading 70, Speaking 55, Writing 66.
• Enabling: Grammar 68, Oral Fluency 50, Pronunciation 58, Spelling 72, Vocabulary 64, Written Discourse 66.

Work down it in four steps:

1. Find the lowest communicative skill. Here it is Speaking.
2. Look at the enabling skills that sit under it. Oral Fluency (50) is the lowest number on the whole page, and Pronunciation (58) is the next lowest enabling skill. Both belong to speaking, so they probably explain the Speaking score.
3. List the tasks that feed Speaking and Oral Fluency: Read Aloud, Repeat Sentence, Describe Image, Re-tell Lecture and the other speaking tasks. Listen to your recordings for long pauses and restarts.
4. Choose one task and one drill for the week. In this example, the paced reading routine in Read Aloud: how to pace your voice and where to pause would be a sensible start.

Try a second pattern, also invented. Writing is the lowest communicative skill, Grammar is the lowest enabling skill, and Spelling and Vocabulary are healthy. That points at sentence control, not at word choice or typing. The tasks to look at are the essay, Summarize Written Text and the other tasks where you type an answer, and a sensible drill is the three-pass check in our grammar guide for writing.

These numbers follow no formula, and your own report will not look like them. A report also cannot tell you which question went wrong, and one weak task can pull down more than one number at once. That is why you trace back through tasks instead of treating ten numbers as ten separate problems. If you use a practice test that estimates your scores, treat the numbers as estimates and look for patterns across several attempts rather than trusting one result.

Do not chase every number at once: one skill, one task, one drill, then measure again.

Next, copy your four communicative scores from your last test or practice attempt onto a card, circle the lowest and write down three tasks that feed it. After a week of focused work, take a practice test and see whether the estimate has moved.