A Drive Out West

Intermediate

3 min

Pro

A Saturday drive to a cousin's village, with lunch from the garden, a walk to the water tank and a late start home.

An intermediate-level session of about 3 minutes. A 121-word passage, scored word by word.

Neither of these is really being swapped for the other. The lower lip drifts up towards the upper teeth without ever quite arriving, and what comes out is a third thing altogether: an approximant that sits between the two and does duty for both. It is efficient, it is consistent, and nothing about it sounds wrong from the inside, which is why it can survive years of otherwise fluent English. Pulling the pair apart comes down to contact. One is a fricative, with the teeth resting on the lower lip and air pushed through hard enough to buzz, and you could hold it for a whole second if you wanted to. The other has no contact anywhere: the lips round, then release into the vowel behind them.

Angles worth taking

Use a mirror for one read, because on one sound the lip must meet the teeth and on the other it must not.
Round the lips before the vowel arrives, so the glide is heard as a movement and not a starting position.
Hold the fricative for a full second as a test; if there is no buzz, there was no real contact.
Where the two alternate inside a line, slow the whole line down rather than stopping in front of each word.
If the repair leaves your w sounding heavy, you have carried the lip contact across to the wrong sound.

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.

west

visit

village

van

vines

window

waved

views

How the passage opens

We drove west on Saturday to visit my cousin in a village beside the river. The road stayed wet after a week of rain, and our van moved slowly past a long line of vines. My cousin waited at the…

Ready to speak?

Part of Pro. You need a TalkDrill account on a Pro plan to speak — reading this page does not.

Browse all read-aloud passages

The format

Passage length

121 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 two sounds apart as they alternate: bite the lower lip lightly for v in visit, village, view and advice, and round the lips without touching the teeth for w in west, window, wind and wide.