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DET Prep Course: Read Aloud

Summary: This article provides a comprehensive guide to the “Read Aloud” question type in the Duolingo English Test. It covers the format, frequency, and key aspects to consider when answering these questions. The guide delves into pronunciation techniques, including the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), word stress, sentence stress, and various phonetic rules like linking and weak forms. It also offers practical examples and exercises to help test-takers improve their pronunciation and reading skills.

A video version of this course:

1. Introduction to ‘Read Aloud’ Questions

Format and frequency
Key considerations

2. Understanding the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Vowels and consonants
Common pronunciation challenges

3. Word Stress and Its Importance

Defining word stress
Practical exercises

4. Sentence Stress and Emphasis

Importance in conveying meaning
Examples and practice

5. Advanced Pronunciation Techniques

Linking
Assimilation
Consonant elision and merging
Weak forms

6. Practice Sentences and Application

Real test examples
Reading strategies

7. Conclusion and Further Practice

Introduction to ‘Read Aloud’ Questions

Hello everyone. Welcome to the Duolingo English Test Prep Hub. Today we will explain the ‘Read Aloud’ question type. The format of ‘Read Aloud’ questions is very simple, just like the image shown on the right. There is a sentence here in quotation marks, which is an English sentence. We just need to read it out loud. When actually doing the test, we can click on “record now” to start recording. This question type appears 3 to 6 times per test, so remember this frequency.

A few tips should keep in mind:

First of all, when doing this type of question, pay attention to your volume. Try to speak a bit louder and pronounce clearly, because as we know, the Duolingo test is an AI-scored test, meaning artificial intelligence is grading it. So if your volume is louder and pronunciation is clearer, it will help the AI recognize the words you are saying.

As for speaking speed, you don’t need to speak particularly fast for this question type. Just read it out naturally. What else should we pay attention to? Before recording, if you encounter some unfamiliar words, you can quietly practice reading them once before actually clicking “record now”. But pay attention to the time limit. Including the time to read the question and record, you only have 20 seconds total.

So after seeing this question, don’t linger too long, otherwise, it may lead to a situation where time is up but you haven’t finished the question. Also, pay attention to pausing properly.

Although this is a reading-aloud question, if your pronunciation is more natural and intonation is richer, it will help improve the score for this question. Also, try to ensure fluency as much as possible. Don’t have long pauses or hesitations like “um” or “ah” in the middle of reading, as this will also affect the question score. Okay, these are some things to pay attention to for the Read Aloud questions.

Understanding the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Next, let’s start with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and familiarize ourselves with it. We won’t go through all the easily confused pronunciations, just some of the more representative ones.

A diagram shows International Phonetic Alphabet.

The parts with a gray background are called “vowels”, and the parts with a light yellow background are called “consonants”, very simple. Now let’s take a look. For example, the group of long vowels in the orange box is relatively easy to pronounce, but you need to make the sound a bit longer.

So, this word is also very simple, it’s “sheep”. The one behind it without the two dots is a short vowel. The mouth shape is especially small, just pronounce it like this “ih-” sound. The mouth shape doesn’t need to be particularly big. So this word is pronounced as “ship”. Don’t read it as “sheep”, that’s incorrect. Pay attention to the difference in pronunciation.

There’s also the group below. How should this long and short “u” vowel be pronounced? How to read the one in front without the two dots? Your mouth is half open, and try to find that feeling of singing, the feeling of contracting your abdomen. Meaning your belly pulls in a little, it’s a very short sound. You don’t need to purse your lips forward.

Remember, so this word is pronounced as “guhd”, just like that. Don’t read it as “goood”, that would be wrong. Only purse your lips when pronouncing the long vowel /u:/ with the two dots. So this word is pronounced as “shoot”. Pay attention to the difference between the long and short vowels.

Okay, let’s look at the group below. What’s the difference in this group? One is a small mouth sound, “eh”, very short. The mouth shape doesn’t need to open that wide, so this word is just pronounced as “bet”. The one below is called a big mouth sound. The mouth opens very wide, feeling like it’s already pressing against the vocal cords. Then it’s pronounced as “kat”, like that. Note that this sound shouldn’t be mixed with the /ai/ sound behind it, so it’s pronounced as “my”. So I hear a lot of people pronounce “bad” as “bide”, which is incorrect. Pay attention to the difference in their pronunciation.

Are there any other easily confused sounds? It’s just these two. One is /v/. When making this sound, pay attention that your upper teeth should touch your lower lip. So this word is pronounced as “video”. I hear many students pronounce “video” as “waydeo” or pronounce “very” as “wary”.

When making this sound, you need to purse your lips forward a bit. So this word is pronounced as “wet”.

There’s also the pronunciation of this IPA symbol that looks like an “L”. In the word here, we can see that this simple word is “love”. So it can be pronounced as /l/, but for example in the word “help”. What is the pronunciation of this word then? Let’s look at the pronunciation of this word first, it’s “help”, pronounced like this, right? So we wouldn’t read it as “helop”. So how is this sound made? It’s actually very simple. We use our tongue to curl up and press against the back of the upper teeth. Try to make the “o” sound, which is the sound we just made. So it’s “help”. Are there other words? Like “school”, “child”, they also have this pronunciation. Okay, these are the common easily confused sounds we talked about.

Word Stress and Its Importance

Next, let’s look at some pronunciation techniques or things to pay attention to. First, we will explain what “word stress” means. It has the meaning of pressure, referring to the stressed syllable here. So “word stress” is very simple, we can understand it as the stressed syllable in a word. Let’s look at the explanation: “In words with more than one syllable, we pronounce one syllable longer and louder when speaking. The one syllable receives word stress.”

First of all, in words with more than one syllable, we pronounce one syllable a bit longer and louder. That syllable is where the word stress is. Why is word stress important? Let’s take a look: “It is important to stress the correct syllable so that you can be understood.” In other words, we need to stress the correct syllable in a word for others to understand what we are saying.

Okay, then let’s do a simple little test. Let’s take a look, there are a total of three small questions. It asks how many syllables are in the word in quotation marks, and which syllable has the stress we mentioned. If you have paper and pen in front of the screen, we can write down the word on paper and mark the stress symbol in a position.

Answer the following questions:

1.How many syllables are there in the word “interesting”?

2. Which syllable has the word stress?

3. Put “ ’ ” before the stressed syllable in the word.

Okay, let’s look at the answer. The word “in/teres/ting” has three syllables. And which syllable has the stress? It’s the one at the very front. So this word is called “‘interesting”, don’t read it as “in’teresting”, that would be incorrect.

Okay, let’s look at more practice. You can pause here and try to mark the stress symbols on all these words.

importantparticipateeventsespeciallyshowcasewelcomingprovideuniversitiesopportunitiesattendorganizingactivitiesinvolvedcommunitiesrecognized

Okay, let’s look at the answer to this question.

Click here to show the answer.

If the stress positions you marked are different from the ones above, it is recommended to check the dictionary again and listen to how it is pronounced. These are the pronunciations of the words we mentioned. Let’s see how they should be read in sentences.

Okay, there are five sentences here. We can pause here, and then try to read these five sentences one by one.

1. It’s important to participate in campus events, especially for new students.

2. The people who attend art fairs and music events are usually very welcoming.

3. Universities should provide students with opportunities to showcase their skills.

4. Recently, universities have been organizing more campus activities, as more students want to be involved in their campus communities.

5. More universities have recognized the importance of art-centered events.

Then we can compare with the demonstration. Now you can pause to read aloud. Okay, welcome back. Let’s see how these sentences should be read.

These are the pronunciations of the sentences we talked about.

Sentence Stress and Emphasis

Next, let’s talk about how to show important information when we are speaking. This will involve sentence stress. So how is this explained? Let’s take a look. When speaking, we pronounce certain words louder, longer, and in a higher voice to show new, or important information.

Okay, let’s look at an example. This is actually very simple, a small dialogue. The person below speaks first, he says “How’s your day been so far?” Meaning, up until now when I see you, how has your day been? How does Jeremy respond? Well, “It’s been pretty eventful.” Here “pretty eventful” is pronounced longer to show what? New information. Then he says another sentence, “For me, it’s good to try new things.” Here “try new things” is stretched out a bit to show important information. Okay, we can do a small exercise.

In actual sentences, how do we emphasize a certain part? For example, like this sentence: “I really appreciate all the trouble you’ve gone to.”, we can stress the words marked in red, and then do an emphasis. How to read it? We can read it this way: I really appreciate all the trouble you’ve gone to.

This way, it’s much better when speaking, because you are doing an emphasis, appreciating this person. Then let’s look at the next sentence. You can try reading it. Stress the words in red, do an emphasis:

If you need help getting another job, I’ll help you with that.

Okay, let’s look at the next sentence. How should this sentence be read? We see that it emphasizes these number-related phrases. We can read it like this:

This is put together as 3 phrases or sections, each being 4 bars long.

You can try it out. Okay, how should this sentence be read? We can say:

As urban cultures and societies developed, there was a proliferation in the forms of literature.

That’s it. Let’s look at this sentence, you can also pause this video and try reading it. Okay, how should this sentence be read?

Infections can often be cured by antibiotics, though resistance to antibiotics is a problem.

For the next sentence, we can emphasize the words in red.

This syndrome is characterized by rapid rhythmic movements of lips so that it resembles a rabbit chewing.

Advanced Pronunciation Techniques

Linking

Now let’s look at another important pronunciation technique, or a language phenomenon that can also be found in a lot of listening and other people’s dialogues, called “linking”. The word “link” itself means to connect. So we call it “linking”. There are some rules for linking. For example, the most common type is when the end of a word is a consonant, followed by a word beginning with a vowel, we need to read these two words together. For example, the group below:

This is what we mean by linking the consonant at the end of a word with the vowel of the next word.

Assimilation

Are there any others? There are also some assimilation phenomena, for example, when /t/ is linked with /j/, it should change to the sound /ʧ/; when /d/ is linked with /j/, it should change to the sound /ʤ/. Examples include:

e.g.: next_year, did_you

There is also /r/ sound linking, for example, “her own”, we can read it as “he r-own”. Also, “answer r-it”, “the idea rof”, we can read it like this.

Okay, let’s look at the fourth point, vowel linking.

– When a word ending in /u/, /au/, or /o/ is followed by a word starting with a vowel, insert a light /w/ sound between the vowels.

e.g: go on, who else, you are

– When a word ending in /i/, /ai/, or /e/ is followed by a word starting with a vowel, insert a light /j/ sound between the vowels.

e.g: be on time, my only child

Also, ending in /i/, /ai/, /e/ and linking with the vowel that follows, then add a weaker /j/ between the two vowels. For example, “be on time”, “my only child”. Okay, then there is consonant elision. Remember when we encounter these six phonetic symbols, which are /b/, /p/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /g/, when any two of them appear consecutively, the first one is not pronounced. For example, we see /t/ and /d/ appear consecutively, so the first one is directly omitted, read as “sit down” (note the letter in red is omiited). Similar examples include: “next day”, “a good deal”, “a bad cold”, “what time”, “big boy”.

Consonant elision and merging

Next is consonant merging. If two consonants are the same, we can omit one of them. For example, “fresh shrimp”, and “watch chain”.

Weak forms

There is another phonetic rule called “weak forms”. Weak forms refer to those word endings. If it is a voiceless consonant, meaning those consonants produced without vibration of the vocal cords, we call them voiceless consonants, they can be weakly pronounced. Also, those function words, meaning words other than nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, we can sometimes pronounce them weakly. For example, let’s give some examples. Here:

There are also hundreds_of other sculptures_and pictures.

The /d/ after “and” here can be omitted, we can directly read it as “n”, just like the pronunciation of the letter “n”. Also, for example, we say “you n me”, “bread n butter”, and rock is called “rock n roll”, right? We don’t say “rock and roll”.

Practice Sentences and Application

Let’s look at the sentence below:

It does not rust_in the air, though.

We see that the endings of some words are voiceless consonants. They are all voiceless consonants. How to read it? We can say “It does not rust in the air, though.” The two /t/ sounds here are directly omitted, swallowed. There is only a mouth shape, but no airflow and no sound coming out. Okay, let’s look at the sentence below:

Public debt equals 32 percent_of gross domestic product.

There are many words in this sentence with voiceless consonants at the end, so how can we omit them and pronounce them weakly? “Percent” and “of” have a linking.

Okay, then let’s look at the sentence below. There are some linkings, right? And some omissions and weak forms:

It_is around 65 to 70 percent less_acidic than hot drip coffee or_espresso.

Let’s look at the next sentence, how to read it?

I received_a report that the public vehicle priority system had started.

This way, we omitted the voiceless consonants at the ends of those words; and for some function words, we can choose to pronounce them weakly.

Recap and Further Practice

The article provides a thorough explanation of the “Read Aloud” question type in the Duolingo English Test. It covers:

The basic format and frequency of these questions
Key considerations for answering, such as volume, clarity, and fluency
An introduction to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)
The concept of word stress and its importance
Sentence stress and how to emphasize important information
Advanced pronunciation techniques like linking, assimilation, and weak forms
Practical examples and exercises for each concept
Tips for applying these skills in the actual test

Conclusion: Mastering the “Read Aloud” question type is crucial for success in the Duolingo English Test. By understanding and practicing the concepts presented in this guide, you can significantly improve your pronunciation, fluency, and overall performance. The key is to focus on clear pronunciation, proper stress patterns, and natural speech flow. Regular practice with the provided examples and techniques will help build confidence and proficiency in reading aloud, ultimately leading to better test scores and improved English speaking skills.

Okay, this is our explanation of the Duolingo English Test Read Aloud question type. Welcome everyone to come back to our prep hub frequently and follow our DET YouTube channel to get the latest test information and materials. Today’s lesson ends here. Thank you everyone for reading. See you next time, bye.

If you need more practice, you can find additional exercises in the DET Practice Test question bank. Also, you can watch more practice videos for DET Read Aloud questions here: