Read aloud gives you a written sentence and records you saying it. The Duolingo English Test is listening for intelligible, natural English — stress in the right places, words joined into phrases — rather than a perfect accent, and there is normally no second attempt, so the habit that matters most is keeping going.
Use the seconds you have to find the long words and the punctuation. Knowing where the commas are means knowing where you will breathe.
Split the sentence into three or four phrases, for example ‘Although the weather was poor / the festival went ahead / as planned’. Reading in chunks is what makes speech sound natural.
Nouns, main verbs, adjectives and adverbs carry the meaning. Articles, prepositions and auxiliaries stay light. Even stress on every word is the clearest sign of a reader rather than a speaker.
If you mispronounce a word, carry on. Stopping to correct yourself, or restarting the sentence, damages fluency far more than the original slip did.
Slightly slower than your normal speech, with no rush at the start. Candidates who begin fast run out of breath in the middle of a long sentence.
A comma is a short pause; a full stop is a longer one with a falling tone. Reading straight through the punctuation makes a sentence hard to follow.
Everyone has a personal list: comfortable, vegetable, Wednesday, receipt, thorough. Learn yours and practise them aloud, because one of them will turn up.
Test your level before the section starts and then do not move. Turning your head away mid-sentence is both a recording problem and a proctoring one.
Read three sentences aloud, record them, and listen back for two things only: where you paused and which word you stressed. That is a five-minute habit with a visible effect.
Not thisReading ‘com-for-ta-ble’ with four careful syllables.
ThisSaying ‘comf-ta-ble’ with three.
Over-pronouncing a word that native speakers reduce makes it harder to recognise, not easier.
Not thisRestarting the sentence after a slip.
ThisCarrying on to the end.
Fluency is being measured across the whole recording. One mispronounced word costs less than a restart and a long silence.
Not thisPausing after every word to be clear.
ThisGrouping words into three or four phrases.
Word-by-word delivery reads as decoding rather than reading, and it removes the sentence stress that carries meaning.
Not thisSaying ‘cli-m-b’ with the b pronounced.
ThisSaying ‘clime’.
English has many silent letters — climb, island, receipt, knee, honest. Sounding them out is the classic error of a strong reader who has not heard the word.
Not thisRushing the first three words and then slowing down.
ThisOne steady pace from the first word.
An uneven start usually means you began speaking before you had read the whole sentence.
Not thisReading a question with a falling tone.
ThisLetting the voice rise at the end of a yes/no question.
Intonation is part of intelligibility. A flat question sounds like an unfinished statement.
40 original questions. The first 10 are open to everyone. Answers are checked in your browser and never sent to us, so you can share this page with a class as it is.
1Complete the sentence with one word.
3Complete the sentence with one word.
5Complete the sentence with one word.
7Complete the sentence with one word.
8You mispronounce a word halfway through the sentence. Say exactly what you do next and why.
One good answer
I carry on to the end of the sentence at the same pace. The recording is judged on the whole delivery, and a restart costs a long silence plus a broken rhythm, which is worse than one imperfect word.
10Complete the sentence with one word.
12Complete the sentence with one word.
14Complete the sentence with one word.
16Describe a five-minute daily routine for this task and what you would listen for in the recording.
One good answer
I read three sentences aloud, record them on my phone and listen back once. I listen for two things only: where I paused, and which word I stressed in each phrase. Anything else is too much to fix in one session.
17Complete the sentence with one word.
21Complete the word.
23Complete the sentence with one word.
25Complete the sentence with one letter.
27Complete the sentence with one word.
28Write the sentence ‘The library, which opened in March, is closed on Sundays’ divided into the chunks you would read.
One good answer
The library / which opened in March / is closed on Sundays. Short pauses at the commas, stress on ‘library’, ‘opened’, ‘March’, ‘closed’ and ‘Sundays’, and the relative clause said slightly lower and faster than the main clause.
30Complete the sentence with one word.
32Complete the sentence with one word.
34Complete the sentence with one word.
36Name three words you personally find hard to say and explain how you will prepare them.
One good answer
Vegetable, Wednesday and thorough. I will record each one in a short sentence, check the number of syllables against a dictionary recording, and say the sentence five times a day until the reduced form is automatic rather than something I have to think about.
37Complete the sentence with one word.
Note
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Intelligibility matters; accent does not. What affects the score is whether your stress, phrasing and pace make the sentence easy to follow, and any clear English accent can do that.
Keep going. A single mispronounced word inside a fluent sentence costs very little. Stopping, apologising or restarting costs a great deal more, because the silence is recorded too.
Slightly slower than your natural speech, with the same pace from the first word to the last. If you have to gasp for breath halfway through, you started too fast.
Yes, and you should. Record three sentences a day on your phone and listen back for your pauses and your stressed words. Five minutes of that beats an hour of silent reading.
Say it with confidence using the closest spelling pattern you know, and keep the sentence moving. Hesitating over it draws far more attention to it than a confident approximation does.