Menu
For over twenty years, companies, organizations, and government agencies alike have relied on ALTA Language Services to provide valid and reliable language testing. Whether hiring employees for a bilingual role, verifying second-language skills for incentive programs, or recruiting linguists to deploy overseas, the goal of these very diverse organizations is the same: to identify who among their candidates has the language skills to do the job. ALTA is the third-party organization trusted by hundreds of employers to provide independent language testing services.
The General Speaking and Listening Assessment is ALTA’s most popular assessment, and is available in more than 80+ languages, from the widely spoken languages (e.g. Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi, and Arabic), to the less commonly spoken (e.g. Haitian Creole, Baluchi, and Twi). Through a series of carefully designed questions, this exam is aimed at eliciting a candidate’s ability to converse in the language being tested. The candidate is asked a series of questions that gradually increase in complexity, requiring the candidate to perform various spoken tasks. In doing so, ALTA’s evaluators are able to accurately rate how well a candidate can speak the language according to our scale.
Scheduling ALTA’s Speaking and Listening Assessment is easy. Simply call or email our testing department with the required information (candidates’ names, languages, and preferred date and time), and ALTA’s Scheduling Manager will respond to you with a confirmation of testing dates and times, along with the phone numbers for your candidates to call to be connected with their evaluator. If using the IVR version, follow the instructions in the user’s guide and your candidates can begin taking their tests right away.
ALTA offers the Speaking and Listening Assessment in two formats—live and IVR (Interactive Voice Response) to give you the flexibility your company needs. The live assessment is available on a prescheduled basis, with most languages available to be tested the following business day. The IVR testing option is an automated delivery system that allows you to set up your candidate’s test at any time, and is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week*. No matter which version you choose, you receive the same ALTA quality and results the next business day.
*To see what languages IVR oral proficiency testing is currently available for, visit our Testing Languages Offered page.
Every Speaking and Listening Assessment administered by ALTA, whether through the live assessment or over IVR, is scored by a highly trained human evaluator—not a machine. This gives our clients a level of quality that cannot be matched by fully automated assessments. In addition, ALTA uses a crosschecking process to continually review the results we send out, making sure that our clients receive accurate ratings every time. We are proud to say that we maintain an exceptional inter-rater reliability (the degree to which two raters independently provide the same score on the same exam). This means that we can keep our costs lower, and pass our savings along to you. Thus, we can remain one of the most competitively priced language testing companies in the business.
ALTA’s Speaking and Listening Assessment measures general proficiency in the target language. However, should you require a customized assessment, simply contact us and tell us about your needs. ALTA has experience designing assessments to incorporate the specialized terminology and scenarios that occur in various business settings.
To see which languages we provide language assessments for, visit our Testing Languages Offered page.
Questions? Simply fill out our contact form or call us at 404.920.3832 and someone from our sales team will be happy to answer your questions, listen to your needs, and help you decide which type of testing is right for you. If you are ready to get started, a team member will also assist you with setting up an account so that you can begin testing your candidates right away.
View our test prep materials or FAQ’s for common questions about taking a test.