The Weekend Paint Job
A first-person account of spending a Sunday helping a cousin repaint her kitchen.
An intermediate-level session of about 3 minutes. A 134-word passage, scored word by word.
You tell somebody what you did yesterday and they hear a description of what you generally do. Nothing else in the sentence has changed; the ending simply never arrived. That is what is at stake in a passage like this one, and it is a grammar point that turns out to be a pronunciation problem. The ending takes three forms and the spelling tells you nothing about which one you need: after a voiceless sound it comes out as a t, after a voiced sound or a vowel as a d, and only when the base already ends in a t or d sound does it become a syllable of its own. The two failures pull in opposite directions, letting the ending fade to nothing, or bolting a full extra syllable onto every verb in sight.
Angles worth taking
- Check the sound that comes before the ending rather than the letters, since the written form is identical in all three cases.
- Count the syllables of each verb aloud once before recording, to catch the ones you have quietly inflated.
- Saying a verb on its own first is the quickest way to hear which of the three endings it takes.
- Keep the volume up through the final consonant, because endings at the close of a breath group fade first.
- Two verbs in one sentence taking different endings is the stretch most worth recording a second time.
- Where a verb is followed by a word beginning with t or d, the ending hides inside the join.
Phrases to reach for
These are shown to you before the session starts. They are what you are asked to use, not a list the scorer is checking off.
How the passage opens
Last Sunday my cousin decided to repaint her kitchen, so I packed a bag and travelled across town to help. We started early. She had already covered the floor with old newspapers and had washed the walls the night before,…
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Passage length
134 words
Modes
Learn (guided) · Mock (exam-real)
How a read-aloud session works
Pick a passage
Passages are graded from short and simple to long and dense. The length and the level are on every card.
Read it aloud
The text stays on screen while you record. Read at a normal pace — rushing to finish is itself one of the things being measured.
See it marked up
Every word comes back scored: accurate, unclear, or missed. The problem sounds are highlighted where they occurred.
Re-record the hard line
Go back to the sentence that scored worst and read it again. That single loop is where most of the improvement happens.
What you're scored on
A read-aloud report has four numbers, and knowing which one is low tells you what to practise — they are not interchangeable.
Finish every -ed ending cleanly, and notice which ones sound like /t/, which sound like /d/, and which add a whole extra syllable /ɪd/.
Accuracy
How close each word was to the expected pronunciation, scored per word rather than averaged into one verdict.
Fluency
Pace and pausing. Pausing at commas reads as fluent; pausing mid-phrase to decode the next word does not.
Completeness
The words that never arrived — skipped articles, dropped past-tense endings, swallowed plurals.
Prosody
Stress and intonation: whether the sentence lands with emphasis in the right place, or flat from end to end.
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