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The LANTITE literacy component is 65 questions in 120 minutes, marked against the top 30% of the Australian adult population. This guide is for initial teacher education students preparing to sit it. It explains the two task types — reading comprehension and technical skills of writing — how each is marked, why literacy is the harder of the two components to pass first time, and how to prepare. Figures are drawn from ACER and Department of Education sources.
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The literacy component is one of the two parts of LANTITE (the Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education), administered nationally by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER). It is delivered as a single section of 65 questions over 120 minutes, which includes a short tutorial at the start. It is sat by students in initial teacher education programs as one continuous block to manage, rather than separately timed parts.
It does not test your ability to teach literacy. It tests your own personal literacy: the reading and language skills a teacher uses in professional work. The pass standard is achievement equivalent to the top 30 per cent of the Australian adult population, a benchmark empirically validated in 2017 against the OECD's Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC).
That 2017 validation was a one-time standard-setting exercise rather than a moving target, so the top-30-per-cent benchmark has held steady since. There is no published percentage cut-off — you either meet the standard or you do not.
The component was developed with reference to the Australian Core Skills Framework (ACSF), in consultation with teacher educators, so the texts and tasks sit within a teacher's professional context rather than an academic one. That professional framing is why the reading stimulus looks like school policies and student reports rather than literary passages.
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Within that single section there are two task types. Reading comprehension and technical-writing items are interleaved throughout the section, not blocked into separate parts, so you move between them as you work. The split is ACER's own wording: about two-thirds of the questions are based on reading texts, and one-third assess technical skills of writing.
| Task type | Share | What it tests | Item style |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reading comprehension | ~two-thirds | Access, interpret, evaluate professional texts | Multiple choice |
| Technical writing | ~one-third | Grammar, spelling, word usage, text organisation | Multiple choice / single word typed |
Items are selected-response (for example multiple choice) or short-answer. No extended writing is required anywhere in the component. Some technical-writing items ask you to type a single word, for instance the correctly spelled or grammatically correct form.
Bank this before test day: marks are not deducted for incorrect responses. Attempt every question, even the ones you are unsure of, because a guess can only help.
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About two-thirds of the items are reading comprehension — the larger, more familiar, and for most candidates more comfortable task. Reading is assessed across three processes: access and identify (finding stated information), integrate and interpret (connecting ideas to infer something the text does not state outright), and evaluate and reflect (judging what the text is doing). The same passage can carry items from all three.
Stimulus texts cover a wide range — procedural, regulatory and technical; descriptive, informative and persuasive; and narrative — in contexts a teacher would realistically meet: school policies, student reports, professional communications, and further education material. The skill tested is precise reading under time pressure, not interpretation of figurative language. Practise reading dense procedural text quickly, closer to a staff handbook than a novel.
About one-third of the items assess technical skills of writing, across four areas: syntax and grammar; spelling; word usage; and text organisation. This is the task most candidates underestimate, and the research points to it as the reason literacy is the harder component to pass first time. It is not essay writing — there is no extended written response anywhere in LANTITE literacy. The items are precise, rule-based, single-correct-answer questions: a misplaced comma, a subject-verb disagreement, a wrong word choice.
Spell-check habits do not transfer. Two groups lose marks here disproportionately: EAL/D candidates, because items reward explicit grammar knowledge; and confident readers, who assume the writing items will follow the reading and then trip on rules they have never had to state out loud.
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Literacy is the harder of the two LANTITE components to pass on the first try. The most recent figures, for 2024, show:
| Component | First-attempt pass (2024) | Did not pass first time | Pass within year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Literacy | 88.1% | ~11.9% | 91.6% |
| Numeracy | 94.2% | ~5.8% | 95.7% |
The gap is the headline. Roughly one in eight candidates does not pass literacy first time, against around one in seventeen for numeracy. That confirms the common estimate of a 10 to 12 per cent literacy fail rate versus around 6 per cent for numeracy, and it runs counter to most candidates' instincts, who assume numeracy will be the obstacle.
The within-year figures show most candidates who miss first time pass on a resit within their year of registration. For literacy that rate climbs from 88.1% to 91.6%, so a sizeable share of the first-attempt shortfall is recovered on a second sitting. The practical reading: the first attempt is the hard part — clear it and you are done, miss it and the odds of passing soon after are strong.
Literacy is very passable. It just is not a formality — and the margin between the two components comes down almost entirely to the technical-writing task that sits inside the literacy component.
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Treat it like a standardised test: learn the format, practise under time, and target the technical-writing task specifically. Start with ACER's free official practice materials, which mirror the real question style and interface — an online practice test, a PDF practice test with worked solutions, two sets of 30 literacy practice questions (2017 and 2023), retired test questions, and a guide on getting best value from them. University study-skills services advise beginning with structure and mechanics and sitting the practice test under exam conditions, timed, without spell-check.
A NSW note. From 1 August 2026, passing LANTITE becomes a prerequisite for Conditional accreditation with NESA, so in NSW the test shifts from a graduation requirement toward an entry requirement. See the complete LANTITE guide for the detail. (Sources: ACER, 2026; Curtin UniSkills, 2026; NESA, 2026.)
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