Everything about the dMAT arrives in English: the on-screen instructions, the question stems, the answer options and, in the General Academic module, pages of academic prose you will be reading for the first time. Most applicants coming through the APS route have studied in English for years and are comfortable in it. Exam English is still a slightly different animal. It is denser than conversation, more precise than most of what you read, and it crosses disciplines faster than you would in your own reading. Preparing for that specifically is worth an hour or two of your week — and it is not the same as "improving your English".
Where the language actually costs you time
It helps to be precise about which half of the exam this affects. The syllabus describes two modules. The Core module's three subtests — Figure Sequences, Mathematical Equations and Latin Squares — are close to non-verbal once you are past the instructions. The reading load there is a fixed set of task descriptions you can learn thoroughly, once, and then never have to decode again under time pressure.
The General Academic module is different, because reading is the task. It is passage-based: you work through a short academic text and answer single-choice questions that apply reasoning across mathematics, natural sciences, engineering, economics and social science. Nothing there is a vocabulary test, and there is no specialist knowledge to revise — but the reasoning is only reachable through the prose.
So the honest summary is that the dMAT is not a language exam, and that one of its two modules is nonetheless delivered as reading. The cost of a second language rarely shows up as "I did not understand the passage". It shows up as re-reading a sentence three times, as an extra beat on an unfamiliar noun phrase, as a qualifier you skimmed past. Small amounts, repeated across ninety minutes.
Read the kind of prose the exam uses
The most useful preparation is unglamorous: read academic-register English regularly, in the subject areas the module draws on, and read it the way you would in the exam.
Twenty to thirty minutes a day is plenty. Take a popular-science article, a textbook chapter introduction, an economics explainer — anything written for an educated reader rather than a specialist. Rotate the subjects deliberately, because the point is to be unsurprised by a field you did not study, not to become good at one.
Read for structure rather than for words. After each piece, close it and say in one sentence what the argument was, then name where the turn happened — the paragraph where the author qualified a claim, introduced a competing explanation or drew the conclusion. That is precisely the skeleton the questions ask about. Our guides to preparing for the General Academic module and reading comprehension strategy set out how to work a passage in the exam itself; this daily reading is what makes those methods feel ordinary rather than effortful.
Resist the urge to look every word up as you go. Finishing a paragraph with two unknown terms still in it, and still knowing what it said, is the exact skill being trained. Look them up afterwards if you like.
Treat unfamiliar terms as placeholders
Because the passages range across disciplines, there is no vocabulary list that would cover them. This sounds worse than it is. A passage that uses a technical term has to give you what you need to follow it, or its own questions would be unanswerable.
The practical move is to stop treating an unknown word as a gap and start treating it as a label. If a text discusses a process you have never heard of, call it "the process", hold on to what the passage says about it — what it produces, what it depends on, how it compares to the other thing — and carry on. You are not reading to learn the term. You are reading to track relationships, and relationships survive perfectly well with placeholders in them.
This matters more for speed than accuracy. Stopping to worry about a word breaks the run of a paragraph and sends you back to its start. Our note on reading faster on the dMAT covers pacing more broadly, and the placeholder habit is one of the cheapest parts of it to adopt.
The wording of the question is part of the question
Single-choice items are written carefully, and in a second language it is easy to read the sense of a stem while missing a word that changes it. The usual culprits are small: most, least, only, except, best supported, the passage implies rather than the passage states. One of those words can make two different options correct-sounding and only one correct.
The habit worth building is mechanical. Read the stem, then read it again before you look at the options, and register what it actually asks for — the strongest case, the weakest, the exception, what follows from the text rather than what happens to be true. Where an option feels right but the stem feels off, the stem is usually the one telling the truth.
This is the same discipline as ruling options in and out cleanly, and it shares a failure mode with the errors described in our guide to avoiding careless mistakes: a question answered accurately, but not the question that was asked.
Find out whether language is actually your limit
It is easy to assume the language is the problem when the reasoning is, or the reverse. The way to know is to look at your own mistakes rather than guess.
When you review practice questions, sort each error into one of two piles: I misread it, or I read it correctly and reasoned badly. Keeping that split in an error log for a couple of weeks tells you where your time should go, and it usually surprises people. Misreadings cluster — a particular kind of stem, or passages from one subject area — and clusters are fixable in a way that "my English" is not.
Then check it under real conditions, on screen and against the clock, since both change how you read. Our note on practising on a screen covers the medium; a timed run at the free dMAT practice test covers the rest.
The fluency you already have
If you have studied at degree level in English, you can read what this exam puts in front of you. What is worth preparing is narrower than fluency: comfort with dense academic prose, patience with terms you do not know, and attention to the small words in a question stem. Those are habits, they respond quickly to practice, and none of them require you to be a better speaker of English than you already are.
