PTE Read Aloud Practice: Check Your Pronunciation Word by Word

In PTE Academic, Read Aloud shows you a text of up to 60 words. Pearson gives you 30 to 40 seconds to read it and prepare, then you read it aloud into the microphone. Pearson scores the answer on three traits: content (did you read all the words, and only those words), pronunciation, and oral fluency (a smooth, natural rate of speech).

Pearson says PTE accepts regional and national accents as long as most regular speakers of English can understand them. You do not need an American or British accent; you need words that come out clearly.

It checks the pronunciation of each word. Read a sentence and the engine scores every word in it; after five sentences the test ranks all your words, weakest first. Each word gets a score from 0 to 100. Green (85 and up), blue (70–84), amber and red are review priorities: start with the lowest words. They are not a pass mark and not a measure of how well people understand you.

It does not score content, oral fluency, stress or intonation, and it does not predict your PTE score. It is not made by Pearson and does not use Pearson’s scoring. The reference is standard American English, so a British-accented r can score lower here than it would matter in the exam. Use it to find the words you say unclearly.

Use the preparation time to find the two or three longest words and say them under your breath, stressed syllable first. Read in phrases: pause briefly at commas and full stops, not in the middle of a phrase. If you stumble on a word, keep going rather than restarting the sentence, since repeating and correcting yourself breaks the flow of the reading.

Academic texts are full of long words whose stress moves when the word changes form: e-CON-o-my, but e-co-NOM-ic and e-co-NOM-i-cal. Learn the stress of a word family together.