Understanding Pronunciation for PTE Success

The PTE Repeat Sentence exercise is a combined listening and speaking task that requires you to repeat a sentence you hear. Focus on capturing the overall meaning rather than getting every word perfect if you need a score in the 70s or 80s.

Avoid concentrating on details like sounds or counting syllables, as this can make it harder to remember the entire sentence and its meaning.

There is a caveat to the ‘not focusing on sounds’ advice. You may have habitual sound problems stemming from your native language or poor instruction from a high school English teacher. For instance, an Indian speaker who struggles with pronouncing ‘w’ or ‘p’ may be difficult for a native English speaker to understand. They might not realize this issue due to how their ears have been trained since childhood. Similarly, a Latino speaker might be confused by English vowel sounds, which are consistent in Spanish and Italian but seem random in English. These pronunciation challenges can impact clarity and comprehension, so it’s important to be aware of them and work on improving your pronunciation.

The only way to improve this is a human pronunciation teacher- I’m afraid apps can’t see inside your mouth and are often trained by non-native speakers to have artificial accents- so they could make your pronunciation worse – you may be repeating back the wrong way over and over and making your errors habit. Also, many apps learn to adapt to your faults, so you think you’re getting better, but the app is just getting better at understanding you.

Pronunciation can be about mouth shape, tongue placement (on the roof of your mouth, the back of your teeth, the tongue is still, the tongue rolls…), whether the sound comes from your chest, your voice box, whether the sound breathes out or breathes in…. so many things more than the sound a device can’t capture. Long and short vowels sounds are a particular mark of native English.

At the end of the PTE test, your responses are further scored by the AI for accuracy, and then that score is graded up or down compared to native speakers. The overall meaning and naturalness of your sentence can boost your score, even if it’s not perfect. Meanwhile the AI will also compare responses to previous tests from around the world that were clearly not by native speakers in order to identify overly correct and unnatural raced sentences, which may be penalized for being memorized because humans are just not that fast and perfect. Speed without pause is always a sign of memorisation.

The PTE AI has also added another layer, a human layer to check the speaker since 20024.

So, focus on understanding and conveying the meaning naturally to succeed in this exercise. It will also help your listening score.

Here are some free practice sets for repeat sentence (and write from dictation).