A word with main stress on the initial syllable may be printed next to one with main stress on the final syllable, which may be followed by another with main stress elsewhere. The last question has minimal or sub-minimal pairs of words to test the production of diphthongs, long vowels and some consonants known to be difficult for many Indian speakers. This test is easily administered. As the student reads a text aloud, the examiner can mark time, pauses, stresses, and make note of vowel and consonantal quality, and award grades later. Students' speech is recorded along with the time taken by them.
Credit is given for slow tempo.
A test of such a test would be to see if the student with the highest score is also the best understood. This test has been used for relative grading and comprehensibility of English spoken by ESL learners from the Indian sub-continent. From an earlier test, recordings of some students' SE were played to a randomly selected group of listeners. Of these only 35 listeners filled in a maximum of 10 blanks correctly. To further test this model of the course and the test, we played two recordings of the highest achiever to an international group of listeners.