The Thursday Market Walk

Beginner

3 min

Pro

A short, friendly account of a weekly walk to the neighbourhood market and the small habits that come with it.

A beginner-level session of about 3 minutes. A 130-word passage, scored word by word.

At the end of a word is where this one quietly disappears. Most readers manage it at the start, where the word gives the tongue a moment to get forward; by the time it lands on a final syllable the mouth is already shaping the next word, and the tongue never arrives. What comes out instead is a dental t, made in roughly the right place but with a full closure and a small burst rather than a stream of air that keeps moving. Many Indian languages carry a dental t of their own, which is exactly why the swap feels like a match and goes unnoticed by the person making it. So the thing to catch on playback is not a different letter. It is a difference in texture: friction that continues, against a tap that stops.

Angles worth taking

Let the air keep moving through the sound rather than closing the tongue against the teeth and releasing it.
Keep the tongue forward until after the word has ended, instead of pulling it back for the next word.
Where two of these land in the same breath group, the second one is usually where the tongue reverts.
A th followed immediately by a consonant at the start of the next word is the join worth rehearsing.
A word that opens on this sound after a pause is where it is nearly always right, so use that as your reference.
Exaggeration is a diagnostic, not a target: once the position is reliable, take it back to ordinary speaking speed.

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.

Thursday

path

thirty

through

think

three

thick

birthday

How the passage opens

Every Thursday I take the same path to the market near my house. It is a short walk, about thirty minutes, and I go through a small green gate on the way. I think about my list as I walk:…

Ready to speak?

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Browse all read-aloud passages

The format

Passage length

130 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.

Your objective

Keep the tongue between the teeth for every th, especially at the ends of words like path, month, both and worth, where the sound is easiest to drop.

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.