Are you scoring low in your oral fluency section of PTE Practice Test ScoreCard or PTE Academic ScoreCard? Many students are not sure why this happens when they are confident that their oral fluency was alright. Let's discuss why the low score in oral fluency might happen and what you need to do improve it.

How Is PTE Oral Fluency Scored?

To know how to improve in a particular area, we must study how are the marks calculated. There are three questions on the basis which your oral fluency score are calculated:

You must not hurry while speaking in order to smoothly say every sentence. PTE says oral fluency is evaluated by checking if the test taker has spoken smoothly, effortlessly and delivered the speech at a normal pace. Individually, oral fluency is scored on a scale of 0-5.

• 5: Native-Like, Spoken without any hesitation, repetitions, false starts or non-native phonological simplifications. The speech should be smooth.
• 4: Advanced, No Significant hesitation, repetitions, false starts or non-native phonological simplifications. The speech has acceptable rhythm and phrasing.
• 3: Good, Might be more than one hesitation, etc but spoken in a continuous phrase. Speech at an acceptable but uneven pace. No long pauses.
• 2: Intermediate,  Uneven speech. No more than two or three hesitations etc. Might be one long pause but not more than two or more.
• 1: Limited, irregular speech. Multiple hesitations, repetitions or false starts. one or two long pauses with wrong word emphasis. 
• 0: Disfluent, Slow Speech with major hesitations, repetitions, false starts, and phonological simplifications. 

These individual marks eventually contribute to oral fluency under Enabling Skills on a scale of 10-90.

What Is Oral Fluency?

It's all about how easily you can communicate in the language. Your English shouldn't be fast but it should be quick enough so that you look like you speak without any hesitation. If you speak smoothly without breaking up sentences or using fillers like 'uhh', it is safe to say you have a good hold over your oral fluency.

Analyze

You don't have to be an expert to know how is your oral fluency. Record your voice with the help of voice recorder in your smartphone etc. Play it and listen if you can understand your own speech. You can also do yourself a favor by practicing it directly with a PTE Mock Test. You can review the recordings later or simply request an evaluation to get your scores.

Things to look in the recording:

• Were You Speaking at a normal pace?
• Are you using fillers?
• Can you understand all the words in your speech clearly?

Improve Your PTE Oral Fluency Score

Here's what you need to do in order to improve your scores in oral fluency:

1. Speak in a natural and audible tone. 
2. If you are a fast speaker, you may tone it down a bit. Likewise, if you are a slow speaker, you need to find a balance for the 'natural pace'.
3. Your words should be clear. Oral Fluency eventually helps in pronunciation too.
4. You have limited time so it may cause you to answer quickly. Let it be known that you have enough time with every question. There is no need to rush.
5. Sometimes the answer is perfectly right in our head but we don't deliver it as such. It's wise to note down your answer (when you can) to avoid mishaps.
6. Be confident.