The Photograph on the Stairs
A family picture above the stairs, an old argument between two brothers, and a researcher who asked for a copy.
An advanced-level session of about 3 minutes. A 139-word passage, scored word by word.
Add a suffix and the letters mostly stay where they were, but the word changes shape underneath them: the loud syllable moves, and the syllables around it shrink towards a neutral vowel. That second half is the part readers miss. Stress in English is not volume on its own. It is length, pitch and a full vowel, set against neighbours that have been reduced almost to nothing, so a word given its written vowels at equal weight can be hard to place even when every individual sound in it was right. The other risk in a text that keeps returning to the same word families is inertia. Once you have said one member aloud, the next tends to inherit the pattern you have just used rather than take its own.
Angles worth taking
- Lift the stressed syllable with pitch and length instead of volume, which is what makes a word sound pushed.
- Reduce the unstressed vowels towards a neutral sound, because that contrast is what makes the stressed one audible.
- Say the members of one family in a row away from the page, so the move is in your mouth before the sentence.
- Endings such as -ic and -ian pull the main stress onto the syllable immediately before them, which is worth noticing once.
- Re-check any family member that reappears later on, because the stress tends to snap back to whichever form you said first.
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
My uncle keeps a photograph of his first office above the stairs. He was never a photographer himself, though photography paid his younger brother's rent for years, and the two still argue about what makes an image photographic rather than…
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Passage length
139 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.
Let the stressed syllable move as each word changes shape: PHOtograph, phoTOgrapher, photoGRAPHic.
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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