PTE Academic · Speaking

Five speaking tasks.
A machine is listening to every sound.

PTE Speaking is scored automatically on content, oral fluency and pronunciation. That makes it the exam where a dropped word ending genuinely costs you marks — and the one where a per-sound readout of your own recording is most directly useful. Start with Read Aloud, which is worth the most.
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  • Every sound in IPA
  • Original passages
Coastal erosion · 1 of 6
Ready·READ ALOUD

Read this aloud at your normal pace, all the way to the end.

Coastal erosion is not a single process but several acting together. Waves remove material from the base of a cliff, rainfall weakens the rock above, and the unsupported section eventually collapses. Engineers can slow this with barriers, though sediment that would have moved along the coast is then trapped, and beaches further along begin to disappear instead.

00:0040s

Press record, read it aloud, then press again.

One free take on this device · no account · no card

Read Aloud is the closest match between this exam and sayit: the words are on screen, so the analysis can compare what you said against them, sound by sound.

Be clear about this

What sayit can and cannot score

Two of the three criteria

sayit's band is an estimate built from two things a microphone can actually measure — fluency and pronunciation. Lexical resource and grammatical range are marked by a human examiner and are not measured here. For PTE that maps onto oral fluency and pronunciation. Content — whether you said the right words — is the third, and on Read Aloud we can check it against the passage, while on Repeat Sentence and Retell Lecture the source is hidden in the exam and cannot be hidden here.
The section

The five tasks

Questions

Straight answers

How is PTE Speaking scored?

By machine, on three things for most tasks: content, oral fluency and pronunciation. Content is whether you said the right words; fluency is an even pace with no hesitation or repetition; pronunciation is whether each sound is close enough to a standard English target for the recogniser to place it.

Which speaking task is worth the most?

Read Aloud, because there are six or seven of them and the same recording feeds your reading score as well as your speaking score. It is also the most practisable, since the words are on screen.

What can sayit practise for PTE?

Two of the three criteria. It scores every sound against its target and reports your pace, your pauses and your filler count. It does not have Pearson's scoring model, and for the tasks where the exam hides the source from you, it cannot hide it either — so those pages practise delivery on a script you can see, and say so.

Does an accent lower a PTE score?

A first-language accent is fine; an unrecognisable sound is not. The scoring is built around whether the automated recogniser can place each sound, which is why word endings and consonant clusters matter more here than they feel like they should.

Is PTE easier than IELTS?

Different rather than easier. PTE is machine-scored and rewards clarity, consistency and saying every word on screen; IELTS Speaking is a human conversation that rewards development and range. Candidates who dislike being interviewed often prefer PTE, and candidates who lose marks to a flat delivery often do not.

Practise this word

Find the sounds costing you marks

Record one passage and read the per-sound breakdown — the word endings and clusters an automated scorer hears as a mismatch. Free, nothing blurred.