Hi guys! I'm Luke an expert Duolingo English Test teacher and today we're going to look at the Read Aloud question type. This question type assesses your literacy and conversation skills, so if these are areas you're struggling with, this video will be really helpful for you.
I'm going to go over some of the key points give you some useful tips and at the end to show you some examples. So let's get right to it! Okay so let's get started with the key points of the Read Aloud task.
This is what this question type looks like when you take the test and as you can see from this example, the sentence isn't very long. And when you take this test, you will have it around seven times in the whole test. I've taken the Duolingo English Test two times and the first time I had it six times and the second time I had it seven times.
So just know you will probably have to do this around seven times. And you only have 20 seconds to complete this task. That's actually quite short!
So this is a sample video from the practice test on the Duolingo English Test website and this shows you how the test is formatted. As soon as the question appears the clock will start ticking. Like I mentioned you have 20 seconds.
I recommend that you spend the first five to seven seconds reading this silently in your head as preparation and then when you're ready click record now, then you read the sentence out loud. And when you have finished you click next. This all happens really quickly.
20 seconds is very short so as soon as you see this task you have to be mentally ready. Before U go on if you think this video is useful please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel :)! It really does help me a lot!
okay back to it! And like I mentioned before this tests your reading and speaking skills, so in the subscores on the Duolingo English Test that would be your literacy and conversation sub scores. And you're scored on three things content, fluency and pronunciation.
And that's what we're gonna do in this video, I'm gonna show you the different ways to improve your score in these three aspects content, fluency, and pronunciation. By the end of this video you'll know exactly how to answer this question type. So let's get started with content!
So for content, it's quite simple you simply just have to read exactly what's written down; however, some students make mistakes. So these are my tips, I call them the three don'ts. First don't add words.
Sometimes for some reason, students when they're reading this they actually add an extra word. If you do that you will lose points for content for example some students might say "if you need help to getinb another job, I'll help you with that. " So avoid adding extra words the second Don't is don't omit words.
Omit simply means skip. Sometimes students skip words when they're reading. On test day a lot of students are very nervous and they try to read too quickly.
If you try to read too quickly, you're more likely to omit or skip a word so be careful with that. And the third Don't is replace. Don't replace words.
Replace here means change. You can change the word completely or you could change the form of the word for example "If you need help getting another job, i'll helping you with that. " Of course that is wrong you can't do that.
You have to be careful to read exactly what is written down! So that's it for content, it's quite straightforward you have to read exactly what is written down; however, on test day when the clock is ticking and you're feeling nervous a lot of students make these mistakes. they add they omit, or they change a word, so you have to be careful not to do that because you will lose points.
To overcome this I recommend that you practice this task a lot. You can find your own sentences, give yourself a time limit, and read it out loud. This will get you used to the time pressure on this question type.
Okay that's content done, now let's take a look at fluency. Fluency is the most complicated part of this task, so pay attention here! When thinking about fluency you have to consider these four aspects speed, sentence stress and rhythm, connected speech, and pausing.
These four aspects all contribute to your fluency and are all equally important. Let's talk about speed first. A lot of students ask me "Do i have to speak really quickly to get a high score on this question type?
" and the answer is simply "no". You don't have to speak really quickly. Of course speed and fluency are related so it is a little bit important, but if you speak too quickly it makes it very difficult for you to be understood.
And on top of that you might lose points on content as well because if you're focused just on speaking quickly you might do some of those DON'T. You might add, change, or omit a word. So my recommendation is to just speak at your natural pace.
Not too slow but also not too quickly. Like i said you don't get extra points just for speaking quickly. Okay well now let's take a look at sentence stress and rhythm.
Sentence stress and rhythm are closely related and there are three basic rules we need to follow. First remember that content words are stressed. Content words in a sentence can be the main verb, the noun, adjective, adverbs, or the negative auxiliaries ike don't and or can't.
These are the words that are usually stressed in a sentence. On the other hand, function words are not stressed. Function words are basically the grammar words.
These include pronouns, prepositions, articles, conjunctions, and auxiliary verbs in the positive form. So these grammar words are not stressed, only stress the content words. In terms of rhythm, the time between the stressed words is about the same and this creates the rhythm in our sentences/ English is what we call a stress timed language.
That means that we place a lot of stress in our sentences on key words and this drives rhythm in our sentences. Some other languages are syllable timed that means that they don't put extra stress on particular words, each syllable gets the same amount of stress. But english is a stress-timed language so you have to remember to put stress on the content words and the function words or the grammar words are typically unstressed.
So let's take a look at an example. Here's an example, where do you think the stress is in this question? "do you know if he's busy this morning?
" So this question had three stressed words know, busy, and morning. As you can see these are the content words in this question so the content words get the stress, One more time "do you know if he's busy this morning? " So far under fluency we've looked at speed and sentence stress and rhythm.
I hope you see how important these are. Now let's take a look at another point which is connected speech. Connected speech is a massive massive topic and it would take a really long video to cover each element of connected speech.
So in this video I'm just gonna cover three really important aspects i'll make a longer video on connected speech in the future, but for now let's take a look at these aspects. So the three aspects i want to look at are weak and strong forms of words, contractions, and linking. I think these three are essential for getting a good score on this question type.
