Analysing responses: Rate of speech

Hello, everyone. Now that you have a better understanding of the different types of items within the speaking section of PTE Academic, we will work on the three skills that are taken into account when assessing your speaking skills. Let’s begin with oral fluency. Oral fluency is the ability to speak smoothly, continuously and effortlessly and you can improve this by focusing on rate of speech, overall fluency and intonation. This component is part of your final score for all speaking item types, except short answer questions and you can be awarded a score of up to five. For more detailed explanation of the oral fluency scoring criteria, download the document that you find at the end of this step.

We will study the three sub-skills separately to better help you improve your oral fluency. Let’s begin with rate of speech. Rate of speech refers to the speed at which you speak. That is how fast or how slowly you speak. Do you think you have a good rate of speech? Before we analyse this, we would like you to try the following three repeat sentence items. Follow the instructions on your slide and record your answers so that you can check your performance later.

[Man] The academic year is scheduled to commence in mid February.

(timer beeps)

There will be two semester breaks this year. (timer beeps)

All lectures will be available online for all students. (timer beeps)

Now listen to Nisha answer the same three repeat sentence items. As you listen, think of the following. Is she speaking too fast or too slowly? Were there too many unnecessary pauses and stops in her response? The academic year is scheduled to commence in mid February. <v ->The academic yeah is</v> scheduled to commence in February.

There will be two semester breaks this year. <v ->There will be two semester break this year.</v>

All lectures will be available online for all students. <v ->The lectures… um…</v> will be available online for all students.

When we analyse Nisha’s responses in relation to rate of speech, we can observe that in sentences one and three, her rate of speech was rather slow while sentence two was a little too fast. So her speech was not consistent. Also, there was some hesitation at the beginning of two responses, which also affected the rate of speech. Now would be a good time to listen to your responses and see if you spoke with an appropriate rate of speech. In the next steps, we will study rate of speech in more detail and we’ll show you how you can improve your responses to provide better examples.